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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25038439">As You Live</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/aurora_borealis/pseuds/aurora_borealis'>aurora_borealis</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>bird girls [3]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe, F/F</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-02</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-15</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-04 09:14:43</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Not Rated</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>76,258</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25038439</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/aurora_borealis/pseuds/aurora_borealis</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Years after Amsterdam, Theodora Decker takes charge of her life. </p><p>(Set directly after the events of my previous story, The Goose Girl).</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Theodore Decker/Boris Pavlikovsky</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>bird girls [3]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1617583</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>12</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Massachusetts</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Like the other works in this series, I will content warn for discussion of domestic abuse, addiction, and sexual assault.<br/>For context, this story will likely make a lot more sense if you read The Goose Girl before this.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Part I: Massachusetts</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>“Be who you are, even if it kills you.</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>It will. Over and over again. Even as you live.”</em>
</p>
<p>-“Break My Heart,” Joy Harjo</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>“ 'Can a bird sing only the song it knows or can it learn a new song?’”</em>
</p>
<p>-“The Lady of the House of Love,” Angela Carter</p>
<p> </p>
<p>I would set my alarm for six in the morning, my phone beeping incessantly next to me in bed the way Popchyk would wake us up early in Vegas yapping for food. Sometimes I would try and be quiet to not disturb Slava, but sometimes she’d already have been awake for who knows how long, watching the local news intently, or looking over one of my old journals while drinking a black coffee in a pink-and-orange paper Dunkin Donuts cup or some tea I’d gotten from the loose-leaf tea place in the shopping center that the tourists frequented in summer. I would go to my closet to find something both tasteful and casual enough for a school setting and take a shower and apply my face creams and makeup, but not enough to make it look like I was really trying to do very much. I would have coffee or tea but likely not eat anything, because I wasn’t ever really hungry in the morning. I would check my phone for messages because you never know what will happen and who may need to contact you in the middle of the night.</p>
<p>At least, that was how it had been for the past few weeks ever since Slava had found me. We’d planned to go to Las Vegas on a weekend so it did not conflict with my work schedule at the school. I didn’t ask her how long she planned to stay and she didn’t say anything about leaving. I think we were just beginning to learn how to be around each other for real, as adults in charge of our lives, with nothing tying us down, dragging us back into oblivion. Not that we had forgotten what had happened to us, years ago or weeks ago, or that we were trying to. Both of us had stopped that. Forgetting doesn’t do any good. Forgetting makes the wounds deeper. I think I always knew that on some level.</p>
<p>I think I had thought I should maintain my wounds to be as painful and raw as they possibly could.  </p>
<p>PBS had a documentary about the reinstallation of the Goldfinch recently. It had been almost four years since it was recovered. So many museum curators and art historians and detectives were interviewed in it, and I watched it at home, tense on my couch, feeling like I was watching something secret- looking into someone’s window, stealing documents pertaining to an ongoing investigation. I could have showed it to my students, the way any teacher will show relevant films. Nothing implicated me, or Slava. Nothing even close to us was mentioned. The documentarian only barely questioned how the painting got from the ruins of the exhibit to the reach of organized crime in the first place, and when he did, it was hidden in his musing about how once again the painting was saved from fire. So, we all remembered our parts of the story; we all remembered what we saw. “See,” Slava told me at the end, as if reassuring me, “it is not so bad, then, is it.” I shook my head but didn’t say anything. The PBS documentarian said the words <em>miraculous recovery</em> and I almost smiled. Maybe for the painting, but I wasn’t sure if I was at the latter point yet, and I wasn’t sure if I’d ever get there through the means of the further. I’m sure some would say my own recovery, or what had begun of it, was miraculous, and some would say it didn’t exist at all. But, I was trying, in the only way I knew how, which is to say, for the first time, learning as I went along, for myself but not alone.</p>
<p>_</p>
<p>On the Monday night that marked the start of the week that would end in us going to Vegas, Slava took me aside after I was looking over my lesson plan for the pre-vacation weeks. I noticed she was holding one of my old journals out of the large collection I’d entrusted to her to read, if we were going to be together and be truthful, we could start, I thought, by trying to fill in the long gaps where we were apart, and make sense of the times we were together and not always truthful with ourselves, let alone each other.</p>
<p>I hadn’t written them in a while. Yes, I was busy, but that wasn’t only it. For years those journals were my only outlet of truth and even then I wasn’t always completely truthful- I didn’t know how, sometimes, I couldn’t bring myself to. Once that New Year began and I went around the world, I mainly reflected mentally, and I didn’t want to be mired in the past so much. But the times after that made me realize if I was going to live in the present, I couldn’t do that without figuring out what the past was, and looking at it.</p>
<p>I’d had a short conversation with Hobie about that when I was in the hospital, soon before I moved. “You owe it to yourself,” he told me gently, “maybe… we both need to try more with things like this.” I didn’t want to let him down, that was the first thing on my mind, but I thought about what he said. He didn’t want to let me down either, and he wanted us both to be able to live well. I owed him at least to try. I didn’t want everything to be pain for me, and since I had gotten back to New York, so much was, even without the drugs.</p>
<p>That Monday night, Slava stood before me, holding the journal with both hands. She was wearing an oversized red sweatshirt she’d picked up at a local store (<em>Mashpee: Est. 1660)</em> and a pair of my jeans that had basically become hers. They hung low on her hips. Her eyes were tired, not in the sense that she had exhausted herself out from reading for too long, but that she was worn out somehow. The thousand-mile stare I’d seen in her eyes on occasion for years, directed at me. She set the journal down on the table as carefully as if she was handling the painting, and ran a hand through her untamable hair, wild and shining like raw silk. My hands were already beginning to wring themselves in worry.</p>
<p>“What is it?” I asked, nervous, looking between her face and the journal, trying to figure out what she’d just read, what point in my life she’d just looked back at- many of my journals looked the same. As I got older, I didn’t usually go for buying the prettier and more elaborate journals, saving those for business and school, not wanting to call attention to my dread accounts by having flowers or sparkles on the covers of notebooks full of entries containing details of my misery I wouldn’t want others to know and, in some cases, I had successfully kept secret to myself for years, like a curse of silence.</p>
<p>After what seemed like an eternity of silence, especially given that this was Slava, she finally spoke. “Now- answer me truthfully, Theodora-” she began, using my real name, and swallowing hard. I nodded, having no idea what she could possibly have read that would make her react this way, that would shock her in my life. I’d thought she knew all my secrets. Strangely and maybe a bit unreasonably, I worried the conversation would be going in the direction of the many men I’d had relations with in New York in my adulthood until my engagement. I wondered with a chill if there actually was something horrifying enough to take aback even Slava that I’d written, and I had forgotten all about it ever since the morning after I wrote the entry. Sometimes I wondered how many nights I’d lost for good, all alone in the world, without even remembering to record it in the journals.</p>
<p>“Tell me how you are now. Tell me if you ever still want to harm yourself.” I wondered what she’d found. Looking back, if I had read those notebooks, it would seem all I did for years was get hurt, at the hands of others, by my own hands. She was putting one hand on my hands, the other on my shoulder, taking a seat next to mine. I noticed her elbow was resting on my school papers, but didn’t say anything.</p>
<p>The whole situation was so overwhelming to me that I almost wanted to get up and catch my breath in another room. Instead I just shook my head no, unable to figure out what to say for the moment. I took a deep breath, inhaling shakily. I didn’t cry, but my throat felt tight. “Why?” was all I could say.</p>
<p>Slava shook her head, strands of hair going back and forth over her shoulders. “Just tell me,” she insisted.</p>
<p>“No,” I said after a minute. “No. Not anymore. I think about the harder times I’ve had all the time and I won’t say I don’t feel depressed about it or anything else ever, but I told you, I think I’m finally…doing all right now. I told you to read my journals but I didn’t mean it as…as some kind of signal I was doing badly. I just wanted you to…to know things about me. To know about the years when we were both kind of lost.” You should know, if we’re going to be together, we should know about each other’s lives, I didn’t say.  I was looking down at the table, not sure how I’d react if I had to look Slava in the face. For some reason, I felt like I was a few years younger, having one of my lies pointed out to me for what it was, but this felt somehow wrong in addition.</p>
<p>“Okay,” Slava said to me after a quiet moment, her hands still on me, as if checking my pulse. After all her years in America and I still heard <em>okej. </em>It brought the slightest rise to a corner in my mouth, even though otherwise, I really would not say I felt my best in that moment. “You know I just…have concern for you.” Sometimes I think we would go back and forth like this forever, even if we both stayed away from dancing with death for the rest of our lives. The past would always be there, and I think we were both so used to only seeing that as something that either would kill us or make us stronger, but hurt us mercilessly either way.</p>
<p>I attempted to compose myself. “I know,” I said. “But I don’t want your concern to mean you’re afraid.” I was often concerned for her and I didn’t want to have to be afraid, but I didn’t say that- I figured she was already well aware of all of that.</p>
<p>“Just reading all this…It is making me see, through your eyes. I was not the only one who kept things from you because I thought it was for the best,” she finished, regret in her voice, a tone I knew too well. If we set our minds on it, the regrets alone could probably weigh us both down forever, but I didn’t think we would.</p>
<p>(I wasn’t entirely sure what point in my life she was reading at that point, as she had begun reading the notebooks out of order- one day she came to me laughing, “Hah! Now I remember the day we broke soda machine at mall food court from pressing all the buttons at once! And of <em>course</em> you said I had the longest legs you have ever seen, you are always right.” She really enjoyed teasing me about some of the lighter entries, and sometimes on behalf of my younger self I enjoyed that I let her see them in the first place. But the day before that she had came to me, her jaw set in anger, “such vile fucking people in New York. I <em>knew</em> you were unhappy. My God. I should have come sooner.” I at first was quiet, wondering if she meant prejudiced people in Park Avenue hating me so politely and decorously to my face, my school where I was regarded as an alien or an object, or Ethan whose assaults against me, which I now understand that they were, were described in studious detail by my child-self, and she continued, “How many fucking years did people treat you like shit there? And you did not say anything to Hobie to not worry him…” she’d sighed and shook her head and put her arm around me as I just nodded, thinking to myself, I sure was quiet, wasn’t I, and that still wasn’t enough to placate anyone.)</p>
<p>I shook my head. “Both of us made a lot of mistakes,” I said. “I think sometimes we didn’t know what the right thing to do was.” We’d ended up leaning into each other quietly, from our separate but close chairs. Her head was on my shoulder and my arms were around her.</p>
<p>“Thank you,” she said quietly.</p>
<p>“What?” I asked. Straight ahead of me, there was frost on the window. The evergreen bushes right outside had small, frozen pinecones. The pine needles gleamed like dark emeralds.</p>
<p>“For always showing me what is closest to you,” she said, “even after all this.” I felt as though my eyes were stinging.</p>
<p>“I do it because I know if I show you then you’ll understand,” I said.</p>
<p>_</p>
<p>We’d been up late that night, so when my alarm went off, I remembered what it was like to be a student woken up in the dark of the early morning. I dragged myself out of bed – Slava, waking up, rolled over and asked me “fuck, already it is morning?” – and began to get ready. At least last night I’d done my routine of choosing my outfit for the next day in the early evening, a vintage wool dress that reached my calves with sturdy boots. There hadn’t been snow that day, but it was Cape Cod in early winter, so you never knew. I always had to spend a long time blow-drying my hair especially in the winter, because it was so long and thick.</p>
<p>“You should go back to sleep. We didn’t get enough sleep last night,” I told Slava before I left her. She sat up in bed, half-smiling.</p>
<p>“It is no wonder we always cut class in school,” she said. “Now that you are the one teaching, you still tell me to stay in bed. Maybe I will even be waiting right here for you when you come back,” she lowered her voice a bit, baring her teeth and laughing. When she kissed me goodbye I felt her bite my lip just so slightly, not enough to be sharp, just enough for my lip to be in her mouth.</p>
<p>In my car mirror I could see the makeup I’d put on still didn’t completely cover my gray circles. Oh well, I thought, I wasn’t a public enemy in this town and no one would be scrutinizing every single detail about me to justify some kind of attack. Maybe no one would even notice or care. I had to say, I might not have minded going to school where I taught, and not just compared to the school in Vegas, and any of the places I’d gone in New York. No matter how insecure I would sometimes feel, here, I never actually felt like I was outright unwanted the way I knew I was in other places.</p>
<p>Sometimes I would just drive around there, past and through and by places, the cemetery, the small museum on Main Street, the strip club, the library, the seaside. I thought, maybe this was how my mother felt riding a horse, being able to go anywhere, being able to just ride and see things, with or without a destination.</p>
<p>But that day I was on my way to work. On the throwback radio station “Foolish” by Ashanti was playing, the familiar piano notes both melancholy and comforting, making me remember lying on the floor in my room on winter nights, listening to that exact song on my CD player and writing in the pastel My Melody journal I used in middle school, and feeling like I understood adults because I understood what she meant in the song, that sometimes it’s the people who should be loving to you that are the ones who are anything but. <em>So sad, so sad what love will make you do, all the things that we accept. </em></p>
<p>Out of curiosity, I’d chaperoned at a recent school dance. I hadn’t really gone to many in my time. I remember once, one of the few times I went, “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out” came on, and I remembered my mother playing it, and when the line <em>and if a double decker bus crashes into us to die by your side is such a heavenly way to die</em> came, I wasn’t thinking about all the nicknames people had given me, and Slava and I shouted the lyrics at each other from the back of the gym.</p>
<p>I was surprised not only at how many of the other chaperones complimented how I looked but also at how many of the songs requested by students were from my teenage years, not just theirs. In a moment that made me think to myself <em>I am fucking old</em>, “Y2K aesthetic is back, Miss D,” I’d been informed by a student of mine, Tanya, who always painted interesting abstract works and had so innocently almost made my heart miss a beat when she mentioned Fabritius’ bird to the other students during my lecture about the Dutch Golden Age. “You know, the cute bird painting that went missing after the museum got attacked and these mob guys in Europe who stole the paintings in Boston stole it too? That yellow bird that’s on t-shirts and stuff?” she’d said, and I’d smiled like a malfunctioning Stepford robot and said that was right.</p>
<p>I liked to teach my students about all kinds of art in addition to having them to projects- watercolors, oils, charcoals, sketches. I’d taught them all about the Dutch Golden Age and its Old Masters, the American West as depicted in nineteenth century art from George Catlin’s work to the Vanishing Indian archetype, the pre-Raphaelites and their varying literary and historical influences from ancient times to the Renaissance. I planned in the spring for there to be a field trip to the art museum in Dennis. A recent project I’d assigned was to ask all the students to paint something in the style of one of the painters we’d covered- a student who painted his sleeping dog in the style of Titian’s Venus of Urbino had been a favorite of mine. I felt that youth of this generation had a more off-the-wall sense of humor than mine did. I think in my youth maybe we were all too angry and uncertain and despairing at each other, at the world, at ourselves. Or maybe that was just me.</p>
<p>At my desk in the classroom I found myself yawning. At least none of the students saw, I thought. In that moment I really would not have minded closing my eyes, opening them, and being back in bed.</p>
<p>I hadn’t really told any of my coworkers about Slava coming to live with me for now- some of them knew vaguely about my good friend who I’d known since childhood, I didn’t want people to think I didn’t have any friends - and there were occasionally questions about whether or not I was in a relationship and one very concerned, well-meaning coworker, Kara, the cheerleaders’ coach, who thought my evasiveness regarding having an ex-fiance in New York could have meant I was hiding from him for my safety. I had to assure her I was safe by giving her enough details without telling her my whole story. And I realized, not for the first time- I really was doing fine. The world wasn’t a safe place. But I was likely as safe as I’d ever be.</p>
<p>When the first-period students began to come in, I made sure to not look like I was half-asleep or distracted. “Before we start, did everyone have a nice weekend?” I asked, because I supposed I should ask things like that, and didn’t feel like singling anyone out. Sure, m-hm, yeah, came a chorus of some of my students. A few of them speed-walked in before the bell rang. Really, I didn’t care if they were running late, it wasn’t their fault if the bus took a long time or their walk to school involved a few too many don’t walk signs, as was so often the case. When you’re that age, a lot of things are far beyond your control. Maybe that’s why when we’re that age, we sometimes look for control where we shouldn’t.</p>
<p>“Good,” I said, and I have no idea why, because I never really spoke of my personal life to my students, but I followed that up by saying, “I did as well,” before I began the lesson.</p>
<p>_</p>
<p>Sometimes I think about Welty’s copy of the finch, and how it was just as real to him as Fabritius’ painting was, and how reproductions can reach far, far beyond whatever gallery or museum the original is currently displayed or stored in. I think about how when I taught my students about famous modern artists they gasped at the prices that one of Basquiat’s works went for but when I played them the movie about his life the day before winter vacation, they were all quiet at the end during the story the film’s Basquiat told, of the little prince who was confined to a tower for his whole life but brought the whole world beauty when he hit his crown against the bars of his window, creating ethereal music heard everywhere, they were all quiet because they all understood in their own way, the way one work of art can mean something different to everyone.</p>
<p>I think about how any art museum or gift type shop with art related memorabilia will have an enamel pin or a scarf or something with the finch printed on it, and all the fanfare going on in Boston because the Gardner paintings were returned too because of us, and Slava tells me it’s because I set “him” free and now he can be wherever he wants to, but maybe sometimes if you go from being trapped to not being trapped, sometimes you don’t even realize it’s happening at first because you’re so used to being trapped.   </p>
<p>I think about how in my seventh grade class I learned the only portrait drawn from life of Pocahontas is in the National Portrait Gallery of London, and I saw it for the first time on a page in my textbook, and it’s an engraving by a European, and in her Jacobean finery she looks swallowed, confined; iron lungs for sleeves and a yoke for a ruff, and she’s encircled by the words “MATOAKA AĽS REBECCA FILIA POTENTISS: PRINC: POWHATANI IMP: VIRGINIÆ," her portrait locked in by it. And when I was twelve and I saw this, I thought, well why aren’t we calling her Matoaka then, and I thought, the scripted <em>Rebecca</em> in that oval encircling her was like a chain, an image trapped forever inside a single chain link. I wondered if any of those people in England had ever told her, <em>I’m so sorry for what we did to your people</em>, as if expecting an answer, if they’d ever told her <em>I didn’t realize your people still existed </em>as if it was a compliment, the way sometimes people- adults, even- said to me. I realized art wasn’t just pretty flowers and majestic landscapes, or sad scenes that were still beautiful. Sometimes it was just pain- depicted, or inflicted. Sometimes you could hate art so much, or feel the pain emanating from it so much, it made you want to cry.</p>
<p>(“This class is fucking bullshit,” I’d hissed into Tom Cable’s ear when the teacher wasn’t looking and I noticed his textbook wasn’t even opened. Better angry then sad. He looked at me like he was surprised I had that kind of voice in me, not just the vocabulary, like he was surprised I wasn’t actually the girl who would disappear if you looked at her too long. One day he would tell me, there are no girls like you at this school. No, I’d say quietly, there sure aren’t.)</p>
<p>Then, later, the changelings. I would sand and repaint and batter new pieces until they could have been centuries-old colonial relics. And in my free time, I was a changeling myself. I tried to fade away by being silent, and attempted to dress in what I was given or what other people wore, and clung to my fiancé in hopes no one would look at me anymore, just him. What I was doing was an attempt at getting rid of myself, but everyone saw their own version of me, and none of which were really who I was, though none ever resembled what they wanted either. I could have never been that. </p>
<p>I never did manage to turn myself into a copy of anything, no matter how much other people wanted it of me.</p>
<p>_</p>
<p>Both of us were in the habit of packing on short notice for trips, so we weren’t thinking of packing our bags quite yet, as we had a few more days until we went to Las Vegas. My year buying back the antiques took away any anxiety I may have had on airplanes, which I assured Slava of due to the concern she showed, but I still hated airports and was certainly not looking forward to spending a single moment in one.</p>
<p>Which is why it took me surprise when, while we were in our bed, sharing headphones the way we used to before we went to sleep, with Slava reading one of my old journals while I just concentrated on the music (Kimya Dawson, <em>haunted by the ghost of the girl I used to be, but the rocks with holes are warm in my hands, and I buried my toes in the hot hot sand….</em>) and distractedly read the latest <em>Vogue</em>, Slava asked me about preparing for the trip.</p>
<p>“So,” she began, “do not take this the wrong way, my Princess;” I began to wonder what I was in for when she said that and I hit pause on the music. I noticed she’d closed the notebook but her finger was in it marking her place. She’d been reading them out of order, so she wasn’t near the end of the long list of journals I’d asked her to read, but it looked like one of the more recent ones, from the time I was engaged, a time I now understand to have been one of the lowest points in my life in many respects, which I suppose is really saying a lot. I vaguely remember one miserable night, just writing on those pages, <em>It should have been you, you’ve known this for ten years</em>- a note to myself. I could have told her that in that moment I don’t think I could have brought myself to be offended by her.</p>
<p>“For what sort of…occasions are you bringing clothes for when we go to Vegas?” she asked. I tilted my head. This struck me as unusual, because she certainly wasn’t involved in her old…activities any longer. (Even though I said I believed her, she’d gotten both Myriam and Gyuri to confirm over the telephone to me as proof. Strangely, though, it comforted me that she stayed in contact with them, that she hadn’t washed up on the shores of the Cape, alone in the world.)</p>
<p>“Well,” I said, “I suppose just how I normally dress. Enough for the weekend but not much else because we won’t be there very long, and we- I thought what we planned to do there was just visit the cemetery. The real reason we were going was just…to be there.” Because we lived through it and survived and we <em>could</em> go back. The town didn’t break us, even though I’d worried for years that it had. “Slava, what are you planning?” I asked, knowing this was no idle question.</p>
<p>“I was thinking, not that you do not always dress nice, but something for, ah, a more special occasion,” she gestured with her hand. “Not for visiting the grave.” I had no idea what she could have been talking about and sighed.</p>
<p>“Listen, if you want to go to some club or party or something, or if you already have arrangements, I’m not going to stop you but I am going to tell you to be careful because you know how hard it was for us to-” I realized my hands were shaking and I was speaking more and more rapidly as I went on. I bit my lip, feeling like I always had to overdo it. The hysteric, the trainwreck, the headcase. So what if Slava had been invited to go to some all-night blowout at the MGM Grand or something, at least this this time she wouldn’t be sixteen years old, and even if that wasn’t quite my scene, I suppose she wouldn’t have to be alone. “I don’t know why I’m acting nervous. Maybe it’s just about going back.” </p>
<p>“Hey,” she said softly, her hand on my shoulder. “Every day when I was there before you I was nervous. And angry and sad and hopeless. And when I met you, I will not say that all went away, but it was not all I felt anymore. So you see, I am remembering how bad it was for me, too, now.” Sometimes Slava had this way of making me feel better, making me realize I didn’t have to constantly monitor myself or justify what I was feeling or apologize for it. “I know it will be not quite a carefree vacation,” she shrugged. “But it is a good idea, no? It brought us together, that place. Even after I left it, I was always grateful to it.”</p>
<p>I was putting my arms around her, and she was laying against me- I could feel her bones through her t-shirt and my bathrobe and wished she’d wear something warmer to bed in this weather. “It did,” I said. I’d considered Vegas to have been such an intrinsic part of me that I had hated it for a long time. There were so many times I realized to myself, how many years I had wasted in hating myself.</p>
<p>I kept telling myself, maybe going back won’t be so bad- I’d even gotten distracted a few times at work thinking about it that week. “I’ll tell you what,” I told Slava, “sometime soon, we can go to New York too. Popchyk misses sleeping on you, I’m sure,” I said, smiling a little. I missed him, and Hobie. I kept wanting to talk to Hobie about all of this but we hadn’t really talked in depth in a long time. And I was overdue for a visit, I knew- neither of us were the type to be that comfortable talking about personal matters in depth over the phone. Both of us had been so used to being too unsure and too caught up in grief to even know where to begin. And I’d spent most of my life being so secretive I couldn’t tell anyone anything. How many times- in high school, in college, when I was engaged, when I got sick- had Hobie said to me <em>you know, Theo, if you ever want to talk</em>….and how often I’d pretended with varying degrees of success that everything was fine, when I knew that Hobie was one of the main reasons why I was capable of pretending and bothered to pretend in the first place.</p>
<p>Slava made a little growling noise at me in imitation of our dog, then laughed. “You’ll be all right. We’re both all right, are we not?” she reassured me, and I didn’t answer, but took her hand in mine as she rested her head against my shoulder. “I will not ask anything too crazy. Just bring one of your pretty dresses. Then again, I probably do not need to say that and this will be all you bring,” she said.</p>
<p>I rolled my eyes, but affectionately. “All right,” I said.</p>
<p>“You should go to sleep. Don’t you have work tomorrow morning?” she said then.</p>
<p>I laughed then. “I can’t believe you. I distinctly remember you said to me in high school that you wouldn’t even be going to school if not for me.”</p>
<p>She looked up at me, arching her eyebrows. “Your point?” she asked, her eyes gleaming.</p>
<p>I looked down at her notebook for a moment. “Slava, I…” I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say. She could have been reading anything about me, really- I didn’t often look over my old journals, and didn’t remember much of what I’d written sometimes- especially if I’d blacked out on a night while writing. It had occurred to me that Slava could be reading about things I’d done or that had happened to me, but I didn’t remember them. “Thank you for doing this. I hope it’s…I hope that we can talk about what you read and what it was like for you in those years too.” It’s not that we’d never talked about our pasts, it’s just that we’d been reunited so recently that we hadn’t gotten to say much, and some days we just wanted to use our time to focus on the present. I suspected Slava was waiting until she was done reading to say whatever she felt she needed to say. Something people didn’t always realize about her was that she didn’t always say what she was thinking.</p>
<p>She noticed that I was looking at the relatively recent journal, and gestured to me to come closer, her face grave and her eyes gentle, like a face from one of Konstantin Makovsky’s portraits. “I knew you were not happy,” she told me, “but I did not realize just how alone you were…” I was silent for a moment. “Sometimes I think we-” I think she meant the two of us, not we as in a general statement of mankind- “do not do anything about it because we do not want those we love to be drawn into our own suffering. So we are in it alone, even if we do not have to be.”</p>
<p>I nodded, leaning my head against her shoulder. I was starting to get tired, and I did have work the next morning. “We don’t have to do that anymore,” I said. “We can be different now.”</p>
<p>“We never had to,” Slava said, and I could hear regret in her voice. “But, that was then. We did not know it then, now we do.” She marked her page and put the notebook to the side at the nightstand, and wrapped both her arms around me so that we were entangled in each other. We stayed that way for a while, and one of us turned off the light, eventually. If either of us had any bad dreams, they didn’t wake us and we didn’t remember them in the morning. I woke up with a strand of her hair in my mouth, and with my head on her pillow.</p>
<p>_</p>
<p>One night we were staying in bed a while before we went to sleep, sharing headphones while Slava read what was undoubtedly one of my earlier journals and I was on my phone texting- Hobie <em>(Please take care of yourself and have a good night. And thank you for the picture of Popchyk, we both miss the two of you)</em>, Philip <em>(I’ve never really listened to EDM before but I like your song, I’m really glad you’re writing music again)</em>, Kara <em>(I won’t be around this weekend, just so you know. But don’t worry, I’m fine, just going out of town. Vegas, if you can believe it. “LOL” I guess.)</em>. For a moment I didn’t notice that the music had stopped; that Slava had paused the device to fully concentrate on what she was reading. I watched her read for a moment, wondering what she was studying so closely, and seemed to still be thinking about as she closed the notebook with her finger keeping her place, her other hand gripping onto the spine of the notebook. It was then that she turned to me, tentatively, as if trying to figure out what to say.</p>
<p>“How much do you remember of what you wrote?” she asked me, very seriously. That was the thing. Some if it I remembered clearly enough and it looked relatively the same as the manuscript I’d rushed to write after the painting was restored and I went off traveling the world for a year or so. Some of it I know I wrote when I was blacked out, or in a miserable enough time that I buried it and didn’t want to think about it, which described a lot of my life over the past decade covered by those notebooks. Some of it was just a long time ago and what I’d written then wasn’t at the front of my mind a lot anymore, even if I had by no means forgotten those times. (The therapist Todd had recommended me to see implied I’d forgotten my mother or wasn’t remembering her accurately – “it’s common to feel guilt over forgetting loved ones, and for the mind to attempt to recreate a better narrative, a more idealized version of the person you lost,” he’d said. I’d found a new therapist after that.)</p>
<p>“Is this about something specific,” I began, already sure that it was. I looked at the pastel of the notebook’s cover, the colors still in good condition even if the spine was worn. Sometimes I felt that it had been a completely different person who had written whatever was in there, that I had become someone else entirely after my mother died. Sometimes I felt that I had become a different person, but that it was always going to happen. But lately, I just thought I was myself and that was that. I didn’t have to lament my existence anymore, even if it was hard to not regret how many years I’d wasted.</p>
<p>“Perhaps…just read it, then, ah?” Slava handed the notebook to me, smiling wryly, some sadness in her eyes. “Is only fair. If I can read everything you wrote, all your deepest thoughts and all those moments you recorded, why should you not see it too?” When I thought about it, that had been part of my intention. That together, we’d revisit my past. And maybe, together, we’d revisit her past too. Even the parts that we hadn’t been together for originally.</p>
<p>“All right,” I said, looking down at my faint penciled handwriting on the pink pages.</p>
<p><em>By the time I got home today I was crying</em>.</p>
<p>(I had done this more than one time back in middle school in New York- the day those guys knocked out Andy and then assaulted me, the day a group of girls asked me if I was having sex with Tom Cable because that was what everyone was saying about me since he didn’t hang out with other girls our age, the day I had to be in a group project and was struggling to come up with ideas and one of my classmates told me I only got into the school so it could use me as an example of how progressive they were and I didn’t even have to pay tuition now did I; on and on I could go…)</p>
<p>
  <em>I stopped after a while, I managed to calm myself down a little by lying down, putting on some CD’s and making myself some chamomile tea. But three to five is only two hours and by the time my mom got home from work I still looked pretty rough, I guess. I tried to just say hi and how was her day but I suppose my eyes were still red and my voice still sounded upset. So she immediately asked me what was wrong and did I feel well, which made me realize I had gotten so upset I looked like I was possibly sick. I wasn’t going to pretend to be sick because it would be pretty clear to her in a minute or so that I wasn’t, but I also didn’t want to talk about what had happened. I just couldn’t tell her. I couldn’t talk about it with her. I didn’t want her to know even if maybe she’d heard some things or she had figured some of it out already. It isn’t like I never tell her anything at all. We don’t have that kind of relationship where we barely know each other the way some people do with their parents. Although I guess that’s how it is with me and my dad.  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>“Did you have another bad day, puppy?” she asked me. I feel so awful, like some kind of failure, like she deserves a daughter that can have good days and isn’t so much trouble and would make her happy. </em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>“Yeah,” I said, looking at the floor, trying to concentrate on her green shoes and trying to remember where she got them and when so I wouldn’t think about how I was going to cry again. I never see my mom cry, not even when my dad would yell really loud and slam things. But I do all the time. If I was different I wouldn’t have to cry all the time. </em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>My mom took me into her arms then. She wasn’t annoyed with me at all, and she didn’t ask me what I’d done this time. It made me feel even worse. Sometimes I feel like I don’t deserve someone so understanding and loving. “It’s all going to be over one day, Theo, I promise,” she told me, leading me to the couch where I just cried as she held onto me. “You’re going to look back and this will just be a bad memory of a time you left behind long ago.” </em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>“I feel like it’s going to be like this forever,” I told her. “Because I’ll always be this way.” Maybe it will be. Maybe I won’t be able to leave any of this behind or it will just follow me for the rest of my life and nothing will ever get better. The worst part is I can’t even tell her so much of it. If I told even half of it maybe she wouldn’t be saying it would all be over one day. Not that I don’t think she doesn’t have her own problems to deal with now. But they’re other people’s problems they put on her, not problems that come from her. Not the way I have problems that come from me.  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>She started stroking my hair as I turned my face in towards her shoulder. “There isn’t anything wrong with you the way you are,” she said, and I felt like the worst daughter in the world, “whoever made you feel that way is the one with the problem. There’s a whole world out there, Theo. You have a whole life ahead of you. And maybe you’ll have a hard time for a while, but I’ll always be here for you. And you can tell me anything.” I felt even worse, remembering how she’d told me about losing her parents and being made to live with her horrible aunt, who would say she was godless and sinful, and how alone in the world she was. Telling her anything would have felt wrong. Like I was trying to make her hear things she shouldn’t have to think about. </em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>I never wanted to leave her side but eventually we both got off the couch. I would be all alone without her. It would be like I didn’t exist without her. Sometimes because I’m so much trouble I worry she doesn’t know how much I love her. But I do. </em>
</p>
<p>When I got to the end of the entry I was speechless- I didn’t remember writing it and seeing the faint words between the floating Sanrio mascots was like walking down the street and seeing my own self at that age.</p>
<p>“I still miss her sometimes,” I said, finally, trying to hold back.</p>
<p>Slava put her hand on my shoulder and looked at me. “Of course you would,” she told me, “is that not only natural, to miss someone who you loved and who loved you?” She gave me a sad smile. “And she was right. Nothing wrong with the way you were then.”</p>
<p>I felt my jaw clench, trying not to cry. “I know that now,” was all I could say. I wished I’d been able to believe her. I wished I’d been able to open myself up to her when she was alive. “Do you mind if I just read this one for a while?” I had work tomorrow, but I knew then if I tried to go to bed I wouldn’t be able to sleep.</p>
<p>Slava held onto my hand for a moment. “I wanted you to,” she told me. “I think it is good for you to remember some of these things you wrote.” I had told her that the oldest ones I barely remembered because it was so long ago. “A lot of sadness in there, but there are many good things too. I want you to see it again. Ah, Princess, you were such a sweet little girl.” I wasn’t by the time I met you, I considered saying dryly, but didn’t. “Your mother saw who you were, do not worry, okay? We do not often get people who see us for who we are.” I sniffed, feeling my nose begin to run. But I realized I was glad I wasn’t alone at a point in my life where I was finally willing and ready to look at the past, not just try and get through the present.</p>
<p>I began reading, and didn’t look up for hours. Slava was asleep by my side, her arm around my waist and her breathing steady as I went through the pages, day by day, of the life of the person who had once been me- who had become me. My story, and, as I saw, pieces of my mother’s, and our life together. After I while I turned off the light and put the notebook next to me, and waited to fall asleep, my face against Slava’s neck, her arms encircling me.   </p>
<p>_</p>
<p>Across this state, in its hospitals and public restrooms and obituaries, you can see its reach, the effects of this crisis. Somewhere along the way you’ll find pieces of the opioid epidemic, eventually, even if you can’t see it from where you are. I can already tell, at least some people won’t leave this out when they write the history of this place during this time. Slava told me when she came here and saw the flyers, the signs, temporary memorial displays, she really thought about herself, and she felt remorse. At first, I thought she meant remorse for surviving when others didn’t, but she meant- remorse for all she had done. How she made her living.</p>
<p>I think in a way I feel, or felt, remorse for surviving, for being here in place of so many others who are not. Not <em>it should have been me</em>, when it was me and my mother in a museum. But more like, <em>it shouldn’t have been any of these people</em>. My track marks are gone. I don’t want to do it anymore, I don’t crave it, I’m repulsed by the idea of doing it again the way I would be by a former lover who invokes horror in me every time I remember his caresses. Maybe I’m afraid I’d never stop, if I started again. Maybe that’s why I don’t ever want to start again.</p>
<p>Philip told me being in New York was too painful. (As of last year, he’s also somewhat sarcastically said that possibly the election was a sign he should wait before coming back to America, if he ever does, though he says he does want to someday). After a while I thought the same, even though I mainly left because I felt like I had to be somewhere else, I wanted to be away again. But I think once you get to know a place you realize it has pain there too. And sometimes you can live in it and sometimes you can’t. And sometimes you just do. I love this place, this town, even this state, really, and I’ve come to see its scars.</p>
<p>Being in this place makes me feel freer and safer than I’ve felt in New York since I was a child, and I realize I can be both of those things. Like I can belong somewhere. One thing about Massachusetts- at least some of it- and Las Vegas is that they both scream from the rooftops, everyone is just used to the latter doing it in flashing neon lights like an advertisement, and the former isn’t so flashy, so celebratory about it.  </p>
<p>A man propositioned me in the train station in Boston when I arrived late at night, asking me hey you seem cool, I’m waiting for my friend here, you want to come back to our place and party you know, we can hook you up, Oxys and shit like that, he said. When I looked at him, I wasn’t afraid. Something in his eyes was looking at something I couldn’t see, and hadn’t seen for a while. I recognized that. A few years earlier, I think I would have taken him up on his offer. Instead of walking away quickly, I spoke to him kindly and I said not anymore, sorry.</p>
<p>I don’t think at this point in my life I can tell you what makes a place your home. But I feel that there is an understanding between me and this place. One that I didn’t completely have in Vegas, and one that I think has eroded away in New York.</p>
<p>_</p>
<p>I kept my secrets and people at work and in town had some idea of that, but I didn’t feel completely alone. I think I was still getting used to how to just be there. Clearly, some of my coworkers wondered about me and my personal circumstances, but I don’t think any of them knew who I was in that my name had been in the news since I was a child. I wasn’t the Attack Girl here, not to my coworkers and not to my students, any more than I was The Unwelcome Fiancée.</p>
<p>“Hey,” said Kara, looking up from her phone to me, as I arrived at the school doors that Friday morning. I’d dressed warm, in long, woolen layers, and Kara was in her silver metallic parka which complimented her dark complexion, and her blue handknit scarf was wrapped around her neck, seemingly eternally long.  </p>
<p>“Oh. Hey. Sorry, I didn’t notice you were there,” I said apologetically, turning back from the door. “Are you going in?”</p>
<p>Kara shrugged. “Not yet. I might be getting a call in a few minutes, who knows. You know, that company should have sent the new uniforms by now…” She’d ordered the cheerleaders’ new uniforms for the winter season from someplace in Watertown, a place I’d never been. “Hey, by the way Theodora,” she leaned her head a little closer toward me even though we were a few feet apart, “you remember we had that conversation about how you came here?”</p>
<p>Before she could continue on, I closed my eyes. Some part of me wanted to walk back to my car and go home. “Please,” I said, my voice getting faster and shakier beyond my control with every word, “I’m fine. Honestly I keep meaning to go back to New York to visit the man who raised me, but being here was my own choice and probably one of the only good ones I’ve ever-”</p>
<p>I realized Kara was now standing next to me. She was shaking her head. “I didn’t mean to upset you. That wasn’t what I meant to ask you about,” her steady voice made me stop trying to figure out what to say.</p>
<p>“Okay,” I said, looking at the ground and biting my lips, “and I really didn’t mean to react like that, I don’t know what came over me…” I wondered if my explanation was making it worse. She’d known me for some time but like most of the people in town who I knew, didn’t know me as the miserable wreck everyone in New York saw me as. They weren’t constantly betting on when my next breakdown would be because they didn’t see me that way. Sometimes, on good days, I thought, they didn’t see me that way because that wasn’t the right way to look at who I was and what I’d been through. During moments of uncertainty, though, I wondered if they only saw me as the calm, knowledgeable, gentle, but quiet and secretive newcomer because I was a liar presenting a false face.</p>
<p>Kara exhaled, “you don’t have to tell me everything,” she said. “And it really is okay. You don’t have to apologize for being upset. We all have…things that haunt us, you know?”</p>
<p>I nodded, thinking that she had a whole past behind her I knew little about, mostly because I hadn’t asked her or other people. “We do,” I said, weakly, but calmer. “What were you going to ask?” I found that I wanted to know what it was that she wanted to know about me.</p>
<p>“You sure you’re okay?” she said, looking at the time on her watch- school still wouldn’t begin for a while. I’d never missed a day, except for once when I had a bad cold, and I took solace in the fact that I knew that I wouldn’t be put through Kara- or anyone- loudly whispering so others could hear as she talked down to me, <em>if you need to go back home to deal with your… conditions, I’ll make sure to say you were taking a sick day.</em></p>
<p>I gave her a little smile that probably didn’t look much like one, given how shaken and flustered I’d become, but was genuine. “Yeah. I’m fine,” I said, “thank you,” I added, maybe a bit too intensely. If it was, though, she didn’t seem to notice.</p>
<p>“Well,” Kara began, “the other day you said you were going to Vegas this weekend. I was just wondering because of some other things you said, did you used to live there? Because I thought you were from New York.”</p>
<p>I thought about it for a moment. “It’s both,” I said, “I’m from Vegas too.” People had said that about me for years but I’d never said it of myself, even if it was true. Maybe sometimes if other people say things about you, that doesn’t mean it’s untrue, it just means they don’t understand the facts of your life in the way that you do. “It’s a long story,” I said after that, because I assumed she was thinking something along the line, and I wasn’t about to tell it all, but maybe, one day, if I was going to be here, I might be able to bring myself to confide in others beyond decontextualized past moments that only made me seem more enigmatic and unexplainable, like someone who fell from the sky.</p>
<p>She half-smiled at me. “Good to know,” she said. “I’m sure it’s really something.” There was a sort of warmth, understanding, in her voice that almost confused me before I recognized it. I told myself not to overanalyze her words too much – most people think of Vegas as a larger-than-life place, so her <em>really something</em> comment probably just meant that.  </p>
<p>“Oh,” I said, feeling a bit overwhelmed, “I guess it is.” I was quiet for a moment. “Kara, you and the girls stay warm today. And be careful,” I said, like I always did, not meaning any disrespect, just wanting them to be safe- as reckless as I was in high school, doing backflips twenty feet in the air at the top of a human pyramid in freezing weather was something I would have been too afraid to do precisely because recklessness would have added to the hazards. I’d been to a few of the school football games here and was always too nervous to watch some of the cheer routines.</p>
<p> Kara nodded at me. “You don’t have to worry so much,” she said, “but thank you. And if I don’t see you, take care this weekend.”</p>
<p>I smiled at her then, from a place of real happiness. “You too,” I told her, going inside, as she went back to her phone.</p>
<p>_</p>
<p>I was preparing a slideshow on the works of the Kiowa Six when Daniel, one of my other coworkers, walked by my open classroom and then stood by my doorway. I noticed him, although I had my headphones in- <em>your mother wouldn’t approve of how my mother raised me, but I do, I finally do</em>, I heard, and I paused my device and took out one headphone.</p>
<p>My experiences with Daniel had been yet more nice surprises, additionally nice because I somehow hadn’t fucked it all up and hadn’t ended up leaving my job, incoherently ranting my misfortunes to Hobie over the phone in the middle of the night as I got ready to take the first available train. (“You should give yourself more credit,” Hobie has told me on more than one occasion. But why, I don’t respond. As if knowing what I am thinking, he followed up by saying- “one day I hope you see in yourself what I- what others have seen in you for years.”)</p>
<p>To make this concise, earlier in my employment, Daniel thought I was possibly interested in a relationship with him. I didn’t initially catch onto this. At the dance I’d chaperoned, he’d been there too, and had complimented my red renaissance-inspired vintage dress from the 70s by saying it reminded him of Arwen from Lord of the Rings, which I took as friendly conversation and responded to by saying I used to love watching those movies with my friend when they came out and it was so nice to be around so many antique and secondhand stores now that I lived on Cape Cod because I could easily find other vintage clothes. (Not that they didn’t have any in New York, of course, but I don’t think my style was edgy enough for many of those stories). A few weeks later when we’d ran into each other at Dunkin’s and struck up a conversation he’d asked me if I would like to get coffee, or dinner, or something of the sort with him the coming weekend.</p>
<p>I was quiet for a moment and realized trying to say ‘maybe some other time, I’m busy Friday’ wouldn’t work, and I knew I was past my days of running around with men aimlessly and unhappily, like I was trying to find something I knew I never would. “I’m very sorry, Daniel,” I told him, “this really has no reflection on you but this really isn’t something I can do right now. You might know that my engagement recently fell through….” It had been a few years and I had never said anything explicitly about the whole thing to anyone (although I’d said a few things here and there), but I figured, one thing Kit and I had gotten out of this was a good excuse to bring up when needed. “It was a very difficult time for me,” that, at least, wasn’t a lie, I was learning that sometimes not telling the full truth wasn’t always a kind of lying, “and I really don’t think that I can, or should, get into anything even remotely approaching a relationship right now.” This is really not an ideal conversation for me to be having in a Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot, I thought, wondering if my explanation just raised more questions and made me sound, as I feared I was becoming, the bizarre newcomer whose closet doors were being broken down by skeletons, who came from trouble and would eventually cause trouble.</p>
<p>But then, I thought, maybe I was just worrying too much about how other people saw me, because Daniel’s response then was to take in what I was saying and to respond, “that’s all right, Theo. You do what you need to do for yourself.” He smiled at me then. “For what it’s worth, I hope things aren’t so difficult now. We all enjoy having you around, you know.”</p>
<p>I just nodded at him. “Thank you,” I said to him.</p>
<p>But now, time had gone by and even though I sometimes cringed whenever I thought of all that, it never came up in any of our conversations which I’d found to be rather natural. (I could have shaken my head imagining how amusing Slava would have found the Lord of the Rings comment, and would probably constantly remind me of it.)</p>
<p>“Oh. I didn’t see you there,” I said, “good morning, Daniel.” His sweater was the sort of hazel-brown color that matched his hair.</p>
<p>“Good morning to you too, Theo,” he said, with a sort of New England type accent. There seemed to be quite a few variances. “Don’t tell anyone I said this,” he said jokingly, “but I’m glad it’s the weekend.” He paused. “Even if I’ll have to spend a lot of it grading tests.” I saw my job as important, but also felt fortunate I didn’t have to spend hours reading over dozens of tests that many of the students probably didn’t always feel so enthusiastic about either. At least, I certainly never was at that age.</p>
<p>I smiled a little. “I’ll be even busier,” I said. “Going with a friend on a trip. Not a vacation. We have some…family things we have to do. You know,” I said, for some reason, because he definitely didn’t know, although I suppose I was trying to have a normal conversation without lying and saying I was going on a crazy Vegas gambling-fest vacation or telling everything and saying we were going to visit the graves of our fathers who traumatized and neglected us and revisiting the city that we had such a complicated relationship was because we had survived to be able to face it together. Put that way, it did not at all sound like a pleasant conversation, not one that Daniel had known me long enough for me to want to share.</p>
<p>Truth be told, though, I had a hard time with sharing things like that even with people I’d known for much longer. But I was trying. I planned to tell Hobie. I still felt such guilt sometimes, not only about his business, but how I’d failed to notice the extent of his own grief for so many years, how I’d failed him in so many ways. He’d once called me a little cub, but sometimes I still felt like I’d grown into a wolf at his door. And I wanted to tell Philip, but always worried I was bothering him, even though I knew that was irrational. We talked, more than we used to before, and more substantially than we had before. I think we really were friends by then, not just two lost people linked by death and confusion. I supposed I’d tell him after, so I’d have a better idea of what to say, having just done what I’d come to do, rather than being before, with it facing me, apprehension and anticipation consuming me. I really was trying to get better, and it really was working, but it never came easy and it never came quickly.</p>
<p>(It still hadn’t really hit me that we were going back; it was something I still wasn’t sure how to feel about. I’d told Slava as much. She looked at me funny; “what do you mean, you do not know how to feel about it?” she’d asked me. “If I thought like that I would not know what to think about most of my life.” That sounds about right, I thought, but didn’t say; she was, after all, trying to help. So I gave her a little smile and told her, “you always know what to say, don’t you.” I try for your sake, she told me. In that moment I wondered if I should worry for her sake, about us going back- if this would be a bad idea for her, but she was so used to bad ideas she’d do them anyway without hesitation, even though that was something we were both trying to stop and recognize. “You are sad,” she said, seeing how preoccupied I was. I told her, trying to not make her worry, because I was essentially fine, “I think, but that’s not all I feel.” I think that was true. And I think she could tell it was.)</p>
<p>“Yeah,” Daniel said, “that makes sense.” He looked at me like he was waiting for me to say something, and maybe that was because I may have trailed off at the end. I wasn’t entirely sure how to say it without sounding like I was hiding something, or without saying too much. I just wanted to be sound normal now that I was trying to make a new life for myself. With that, it hit me that maybe Daniel didn’t want to press me for more questions after what I’d said- family being complicated wasn’t uncommon, that was one lesson that I’d learned and hadn’t forgotten at a young age. “Where are you going?” he asked then.</p>
<p>I almost hesitated. “Las Vegas,” I said, and could feel the neon lights and desert dust and emanating from my voice, realizing I was looking away and staring at the wall, where one of my predecessors had hung up a poster of <em>The Scream</em>. I tried to smile a little, make myself sound less like the sonorous-voiced bedroom-eyed film femme fatale, the one with the dark past who tries to outrun it by leaving the city but only brings her trouble with her. Something out of my dad’s movies, to follow in his footsteps of him ending like one of his onscreen roles would have. Maybe that used to be me, but not now. “You know, I actually did have family there. My friend and I, we both did. We didn’t live right in the city though.” I realized that my usage of past tense and the fact that I didn’t say we were visiting any people made it clear I was speaking of dead family.</p>
<p>“Well,” Daniel said after a moment. “I hope you and your friend have a safe trip. Is your friend from around here?”</p>
<p>I couldn’t help but smile. “She’s from just about everywhere but here,” I said. “You’re from Hyannis, right?” It was a town I vaguely knew. He nodded.</p>
<p>“I didn’t cross the bridge until I was ten,” he said. “You know, the bridge to Cape Cod.” Something about the bridge was nostalgic for me in a strange way- like the bridges in New York. But every time I drove over I’d see the signs, pleading with people not to jump, to call the hotline. It’s not that I’d never seen anything like that in New York, but I noticed things like that a lot now- part of it, I think, was the epidemic, but part of it was that in this new setting I was observing everything for the first time. Call this phone number instead of dying today; call this phone number for Narcan; call this phone number to get out of a violent household. When I look at the numbers I hear <em>you don’t have to die, not today</em>. I can’t recall seeing them in my youth in Vegas- it was another era, but then again, maybe I just never paid them attention, or I forgot them. If I’d seen them, I wonder what I would have done. What we would have done. I think we may have not done anything. We wouldn’t have trusted any professional with our lives. They’d never shown us they could be trusted, after all.</p>
<p>I laughed a little then. “No, I know that one by now,” I said.</p>
<p>There was moment of silence. “I have to get to my class,” he said, “but it’s always good talking to you, Theo.”</p>
<p>“Thank you,” I said, even though it might have been better to say something more relaxed like “you too,” or something. I’m not exactly used to people saying things like that to me. “Good luck with the classes and having to grade all that homework this weekend,” I told him.</p>
<p>“Keep a window open to keep down all those paint fumes,” Daniel retorted. “But really. I hope your trip goes well,” he said to me after, his voice lowering.</p>
<p>I thought a moment. “I hope it does too,” I said. I didn’t say it, but I had a feeling it would. Maybe I wouldn’t exactly enjoy it all, but I thought then, it would be all right. No one was dying, no one was running away anymore. And I wasn’t always on the best terms with all of it, but I was no longer afraid of the whole world.</p>
<p>_</p>
<p>On one of our weekend vacations to the Hamptons in my summer with Kit, I’d stood alone by the side of whoever’s pool it was, clothed from shoulders to my ankles with my thick coverup. I’m not even sure why I ever even bothered bringing my swimsuit on any of those trips, because I never once took off the coverup. Everyone was either swimming, or dressed for swimming partially or wholly, tanning or having cocktails or going to get beers at the bar. I would have struck up a conversation with the bartender, but on those trips I didn’t want to do anything that would cause people to notice me, or speak to me.</p>
<p>I didn’t like the summer as a whole for this reason- I liked having time alone with Kit, but we could never do that on the weekends, we always had to go to someone’s summer home, and I much preferred staying in New York, where we typically didn’t have to run into any of his friends or other members of high society, who didn’t spend summers in the city. Being alone was better.  </p>
<p>I didn’t drink, so no one would be able to say that I did, so no one would be able to say <em>would you just look at her</em>, joking about me in their own drunken states. I didn’t even get a glass of water then, despite the high-eighties heat, because I was so paranoid that someone would see me drinking water and would barrage me with questions about <em>oh are you deciding to be sober now? </em>or whisper <em>who does she think she’s kidding? I mean, we all know she’s fiending on heroin, what’s one cocktail compared to that?  </em>To get to the point, after a long day in the crowded, humid yard, I collapsed from dehydration. I could feel the harsh reverberation of my arm hitting the thick wood of the Adirondack chair that was, of course, in good condition and quality, and at least didn’t give me splinters. When I opened my eyes my lips were cold, and I inhaled the water that flowed into my mouth, but I barely had the energy to move any other part of me. I felt like Sleeping Beauty, when she woke up. Briar Rose, cursed by the needle destined to merge with her flesh and put her to sleep, only to be saved by the prince’s kiss. The lovers in an old room full of furnishing hundreds of years old, surrounded by the needlelike points of thorns barricading her bed.</p>
<p>It didn’t happen that way. The bartender had brought me a glass bottle of water, and Kit had called an ambulance on his cell phone and was checking my pulse. I felt my sleeve fall down my arm, brushing against my skin. A warm breeze, full with humidity, washed over me like steam. I could hear murmurs and whispers, growing indistinct as they melded together, but I wasn’t in a state to try and figure out what they were saying. Only later, when I saw these people again on many occasions, did the infinite possibilities, each worse than the last, of what they could have been saying ran through my head- after all, they’d said enough to my face that showed what they thought about me. </p>
<p>“Your pulse is fine,” Kit reassured me, putting his hand at the back of my head. “And you didn’t hit your head.” I tried to say all right, but I think I just mouthed it.</p>
<p>“You just have to hydrate yourself and you’ll be all right,” the bartender told me, looking at me sympathetically, at least that I could see through my lowered eyelids.</p>
<p>I’ve never been all right, I thought, and could have laughed.</p>
<p>When the ambulance came, Kit came along with me. I lay in the hospital, half-paying attention to the doctor explaining things about dehydration I already knew while a song wouldn’t get out of my head- <em>darlin doesn’t have a problem, lying to herself ‘cause her liquor’s top shelf, it’s alarming honestly how charming she can be, fooling everyone, telling them she’s having fun, she says, you don’t wanna be like me, don’t wanna see all the things I’ve seen, I’m dying….</em>And a few hours later I was discharged from the hospital, feeling tried but steady enough to walk and keep my eyes open. “You can go back if you like,” I told Kit, “I think I’m going to just go lie down.” But he walked me back to our room in the guest house with me, and that night when we got ready for bed, he carried me in, as carefully as if he were holding a tray of centuries-old glassware. I stayed very still, as still as I was when I was in the space between unconsciousness and having woken up.</p>
<p>“You’re all right?” he asked me then. The moonlight shining into our dark room, the red moon of summer. The linen curtains lifting ever so slightly in the night breeze. The sound of crickets that comes when summer has entered its final stage. Soon he would propose to me, and our psychedelic painting of a summer would become a more somber autumn portrait, posed and austere. </p>
<p>I felt helpless and miserable and hopeful and alone, all alone, except for him, and somehow that felt like it was supposed to. I wanted to fall back and close my eyes and then open them and see that everything was as it should be, and immediately be able to recognize it, because I wasn’t sure if I’d know how to.</p>
<p>I nodded wordlessly, rolling back my head to the side. My throat exposed and my body under the covers laid out like a vampire laid out in her coffin, ready to be taken out for the night. But we were never as sure as what our performances were supposed to entail at night.</p>
<p>(In a moment of what I’d thought was insanity then, the next night, when everyone was busy sharing anecdotes about their lives around the outdoor table or whatever it is that they were doing, the votive candles in the pool shining, I was speaking of my life with Grant, the bartender, inside the summer house, and we were sharing pieces of our lives, true pieces but not the whole picture, the way you do when you meet someone you know you won’t see again, but make the most of your connection with all the same, and I kissed him, and he kissed me back, on the floor behind the indoor bar. I shouldn’t be here, I told him, and he said he wouldn’t tell anyone, and I said more firmly, no, I mean, I shouldn’t be <em>here</em>, and he took my head in his hands- you’re going to be okay, he told me. Why the fuck would you say that? I considered asking. You don’t know me, I could have told him. I wish I could believe you, I thought, wondering if I’d cry in his arms. But I didn’t, and no one noticed we were missing. And he just kissed me again, and unzipped my cover-up, and when I smelled chlorine and cologne and vodka on him as he lay on top of me, I vaguely felt like there was something alive in both of us that was touching.)</p>
<p>Help me, I thought, free me. I closed my eyes and thought of Philip. Help me, make me all right, show me how to do that. I opened my eyes languidly and smiled a little. “Can I get some water?” I asked. When he brought me a glass I took it in his hand before he could finish handing it over to me, and our fingers touched. I drank from it with his hand still on it, our fingers together, like some sick version of John Duncan’s Tristan and Isolde. I drank it all and he kissed my watery lips, like CPR, and my throat was cool with expensive, fragrant mineral water, and it was so hot even at night I started to take off my nightgown and he helped me, and his skin looked even whiter against mine than it usually did, and in his arms I wondered was this what safety was supposed to feel like, was this what being taken care of was supposed to be, If I was never going to get better was this the best I could get? Maybe it all was. And for the moment I loved that about him, as much as I resented it about him, and us.</p>
<p>When we were done and ready for bed, I wrapped my unclothed self up in the blankets, the way I used to when it was a cool night in my old room in New York, and fell asleep pretty soon, and when I woke up, alone, with a note on the pillow from Kit saying he was on an early-morning run with the guys, I wrote about the weekend in my journal from the bed. I was completely alone. I remember writing, <em>this is the first moment of peace I’ve had this whole weekend. </em></p>
<p>And the weekends always ended, and they always came back, as long the as summer lasted, and they always would, as long as there were summers.</p>
<p>_</p>
<p>It was the last class of the day and honestly, I was anticipating the bell as much as most of my students probably were, although I’d heard among the students that some of them liked having my class- at any time of day, or for their final period because it was a relaxing way to end the day, and that my class was neither hard nor boring, and I was a “cool” (I really did not expect to ever be called that word especially by a younger person) teacher, something that genuinely touched me more than I anticipated. Partially because I didn’t think I was much of a relaxing person to be around, partially because even though I knew I was knowledgeable on my subject, it felt good to have confirmation that my class and I were making the students happy, which as far as I was concerned, meant I was doing my job correctly. I didn’t want to be like Todd, who talked about his <em>projects with the underprivileged youth</em> to me, saying I’d inspired him, in my flagrant difference in existing as myself, to do whatever he thought he was doing when he walked into places he didn’t understand to claim to help kids he had to know he wasn’t even trying to understand. I just wanted to do my job and see these kids through the day responsibly.</p>
<p>As the bell was about to ring, I noticed some of the students talking about their weekend plans. Before the bell could ring- I could see the red hand on the clock moving- I raised my voice a little. “I hope you all have a good weekend,” I said, “I’ll be going away but I won’t be missing any school days. I don’t know how available I’ll be for contact but if you ever have anything to talk about when I’m at school, you know where to find me.” I didn’t really make a big deal out of weekends to the students, because I tended to doubt that they’d need anything urgent from their art teacher over two and a half days’ course, but since I was taking a rare leave, I just thought I would say something. It felt like the right time to tell them that if they ever wanted someone to talk to, I’d at least listen, although I felt I certainly was not the kind of adult that could help solve any problems much bigger than homework advice. In the moment I almost felt like I should regret saying it, like I’d made another stupid move on my behalf. But instead it seemed to cause no issue among anyone. “You have a good trip, Ms. D,” Tanya told me, her voice carrying across the room as she walked out with some friends- she always called me that, I never abbreviated my name. Victor, another of my students, a real artistic type who was always quiet, waved goodbye to me, his messenger bag hanging off one shoulder. </p>
<p>I watched my students leave. I always let the last of them leave before I left the room myself. Maybe that was some kind of protective instinct, maybe that was some sort of adherence to unspoken rules, maybe that was just me watching these kids who I had come to see myself in go about their lives, watching them leave my classroom and go on with their own business, because they could and I was glad to see them have that, or any, option.</p>
<p>Sometimes I remember a conversation Kara and I had one day after some assembly. “You know, I went here,” she told me. “And now I teach here. Some people say high school is the best time of your life. I don’t know about that. But people sure keep thinking about it for the rest of their lives,” she’d said to me, looking me over.</p>
<p>I’d exhaled. “You can definitely say that again,” I told her, and after a moment, “I was barely there for the school part of high school. But the rest of it…I guess it’s complicated. I hated that time, but if it was all bad, I wouldn’t be here.” I didn’t clarify if <em>here </em>meant <em>in town at the school </em>or <em>on this Earth any longer</em>. Maybe it was both. Maybe I didn’t need to say it was one or the other.</p>
<p>When the classroom was empty except for me I thought of that, and smiled to myself. On the walls decorating the hallway were my students’ projects; one of them a Cape sand dune in the style of Georgia O’Keefe. It had been years but I could still remember the feel of the red desert sands on my palms, my knees, the grains in my mouth on a windy day. A few times, I remember thinking I swallowed some, asking Slava if she’d brought any water, coughing out the words. I walked through the hall of paintings by myself, ready to walk back through my past, knowing the whole future was now in front of me, but first, the weekend. </p>
<p>_</p>
<p>When I returned home Slava was waiting for me on the couch, and I was reminded of all the movies I’d seen where the kid comes home late from the party and the parents are waiting in the living room in the middle of the night, or maybe the ones where the housewife is right there waiting at 5 PM. I’d seen a lot of movies that never looked like my life, but somehow were familiar.</p>
<p>“Ah,” she said, calmly and pleasantly, looking up from one of the journals while the TV played some rock music video (was it VH1? I recalled watching that station in Vegas) as if she’d been looking for me at some kind of function, “there you are, my Princess.” She was wearing an old-looking denim jacket I didn’t recognize and I wondered if she’d picked it up in one of the numerous secondhand clothing stores up and down the Cape, which made me wonder what she’d been doing when I was at work, because I didn’t ask her every single day, what did you do today? I was so new to it, we both were. I didn’t want her to feel like I was monitoring her, like I didn’t trust her. Maybe I hadn’t always been so trusting and maybe I hadn’t been wrong all the time. But something I knew about Slava was that she understood her situation, no matter what it was, even if she was trying to change it, even if it was hell on earth and she was stuck in it, and I would have known without her repeated insistences that she was done with her old life as much as it was done with her. It was just that we both had new lives now, and part of that was shared, but everyone has their own life, and I wanted to know what her own parts were.</p>
<p>“…Did something happen?” I asked, unsure whether or not to be concerned. She wasn’t acting like anything was wrong, but that didn’t necessarily indicate everything was all right.</p>
<p>She waved her hands, one of her gestures, ‘it is no matter’. “I was thinking, how many years since we have been there? Of course, I left there after you did, we have a different amount of years. But nonetheless,” and here she looked me in the eyes rather intently, “we have both had many years to think about it.”</p>
<p>I wasted a lot of them, I didn’t say, thinking it would be redundant. Instead, I walked over to the couch and sat next to her. The television was now showing the commercial break, advertising some EDM festival. It reminded me vaguely of half-remembered college nights, all thumping bass that shook the furniture in dorms and shrieking cyber notes and everything whirling around. Dancing on tables, techno beats screaming and thumping and autotuned voices clear as rivers, pure oblivion.</p>
<p>“Are you nervous about going back, Slava?” I asked. “You’re all right to go?” I wanted to make sure, even if it had been her idea- maybe especially because it had been her idea.</p>
<p>She laid out her hand, palm up, flat, looking at me with earnest wryness. Laid against the cushions of the couch she looked so small. “I was,” she admitted, “maybe still am, a little.”</p>
<p>“You know,” I told her, “I used to think you weren’t afraid of anything. I really looked up to that in you. You were… you, and I thought I was so pathetic. But I don’t think that was right of me now. Because- because you’re allowed to feel these things. You won’t be alone feeling that way, Slava.” Part of me felt awkward and false saying things like that, like I wasn’t supposed to be balanced or helpful. <em>I was the crazy one</em>, an old voice reminded me, <em>we’re both supposed to be, Slava just isn’t like you, she can take it</em>. As an adult I found myself wondering if, as a child and even in more recent years, I’d seen Slava as so invincible and fearless because I’d seen myself as so weak compared to her, the way she’d felt such guilt and self-hatred but thought I was, as she once breathlessly called me, “my angel.” Some of this I’d worked through on my own, some of it I’d told my second therapist in New York.</p>
<p>She looked at me, smiling sadly, placing her hand over mine, and I think she understood, as she shook her head to what I said. “I think I have told you this,” she said, “but those years were the best of all my childhood.”</p>
<p>I wouldn’t cry, I told myself, and I didn’t, but sometimes when I told myself that I did anyway, and it always felt wrong, even when logically, I knew it was something that would happen. Part of the process, as my therapist- the more helpful one, at least- said.</p>
<p>“I guess this trip proves we can have good times as adults,” I said, maybe sounding a little desperate.</p>
<p>Slava raised her eyebrows at me. “I thought we had been doing that from the day I ran into you that winter you were engaged.” It felt like so long ago when I thought about it. It was, and it wasn’t. Time worked strangely for me, I’d thought, but maybe I wasn’t the only one. There was a time when Slava and I may as well have been the only two people on Earth for all we were concerned, but lately, I’d been feeling so much less alone it was beginning to overwhelm me, I wasn’t used to it. Growing up I’d been alone except for my mother, then I had Slava, and then I was just alone. I wasn’t used to feeling like there was any room for me, like I was welcome in general in the world. It was a strange feeling, and I wanted to make sure I was handling it right. I wondered sometimes about asking Slava if she worried about it. Every time I remembered it, I wondered why I wouldn’t ask her.</p>
<p>“Honestly,” I sighed, “those were probably the only good times I ever had during that…part of my life.”</p>
<p>She nodded, like she already knew- of course she did, just as I knew that her time in Las Vegas was the closest she ever had to real happiness as a child. Then she looked me in the face and said, “I think this time we will have just, good times there. Maybe there will always be a little good and bad together for some things.” Maybe there would be, and maybe there was some truth in her opinion that good and bad wasn’t so easily defined or separated. But maybe, if that was true, it meant that the bad, even when it was there, didn’t have to override the good. </p>
<p>“I think…” I tried to put it into words. “If we go back, it won’t be so bad anymore.” Maybe it was like remembering- the past wouldn’t be so hurtful if it wasn’t pushed away into oblivion and forgotten.</p>
<p>“No,” said Slava, a knowing, conspiratorial look in her eye as she put her arm around my shoulders, “I do not think it will be.”</p>
<p>We stayed like that for a moment, barely noticing the television which was still on and now playing 1990s grunge videos.  “Fuck,” I said listlessly, reflexively, even though as I said it I realized it wasn’t even much trouble.</p>
<p>“Oh, now what, Princess,” Slava said as if she were humoring me.</p>
<p>“Did you pack yet? Because I didn’t and we have to be up early.” Of course, packing wouldn’t even take that long. But thinking about the whole process of traveling exhausted me. It had felt so much more manageable to me when I was buying back all the antiques. “And out of all the cities in the world we have to travel through to get there….” The thought of it frustrated me already.</p>
<p>“I started, do not worry. Is only a weekend anyway,” she raised her hand slightly, smiling in some catlike expression, “I am sure whatever you bring will be perfect.”</p>
<p>I stared at her quietly, not wanting to ask what she was getting us into. “Do not worry!” she said before I could talk. “You worry too much.”</p>
<p>“Well, you know I worry on behalf of the both of us,” I said, not entirely joking.  </p>
<p>“We used to share everything. Do not insist on keeping all of that inside you,” she said to me, which I wasn’t sure how to respond to, because she’d countered what I’d said facetiously as if I was completely serious, though part of me was.</p>
<p>After a moment of quiet, I spoke up again. “I suppose it can wait. It won’t take much time and it’s early,” I said, trying to stay practical and hoping we’d stay practical on this trip. Slava had recently mentioned going into club management for work, which I told her I supported wholeheartedly, but I did not want to be staying in Vegas nightclubs until four in the morning this weekend. I definitely did not think it would be a good idea for me to use whatever stamina was left in me on something like that, even if I suppose I’d let Slava convince me to have a night out on the town or something to the extent.</p>
<p>Outside I could hear the trees blowing in the wind, some cars going down the street slowly, some voices calling outside. In the city there was so much noise sometimes I barely heard it; here, I could pay attention to the sounds easier. It was dark by this time, the sky a deep blue, almost black, like the ocean at night. In some areas of town and nearby areas you could see stars in the sky, laid out like crystals embroidered onto a gown. I didn’t really do it anymore, but when I first got here, and would go to the beach at night, I’d sometimes lie down in the sand and look at the stars, and of course, the moon. I would always feel more awake afterwards. I thought, then, of the sky in Vegas, the stars, the endless sands, the moon, so expansive it was like I was floating aimlessly, lost in the universe, but I wasn’t alone. And we weren’t lost anymore.</p>
<p>We were on the couch together, leaning into each other as the television played the endless throwback videos. Long-haired, flannel-wearing, guys riding skateboards, girls with tangled hair and thick black eyeliner screaming into the camera. “Tell me about your day at school, then, if we have the time,” Slava asked me. With some excitement in her voice she asked, “did you tell them you were going?”</p>
<p>I sighed, smiling at her, not really exasperated. “Yes,” I said, “I did. But it was a mostly typical day, really.” So I told her about it, and she listened, and the more I spoke, the less out of place in the world I felt. I neither dreaded my trip, or my inevitable return on Sunday. Our rough hands were warm, joined together. It all felt right, and I wondered if I’d ever get used to that, if it would ever stop catching me unaware.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Nevada</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I specifically feel like I should give a content warning for towards the end of this chapter, where there are discussions about sexual abuse.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Part II: Nevada</p><p> </p><p>“What's a girl like you doing in a place like this?</p><p><em>That's what I'd like to know, what are we all doing in a place like this</em>?”</p><p>-“Deer Dancer,” Joy Harjo</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>“The Dark — felt beautiful —”</em>
</p><p> -“I think I was enchanted,” Emily Dickinson</p><p> </p><p>For the second time in my life, I walked off the airplane and into McCarran International Airport’s bright interior, sunlight flooding the vast windowpanes, shining retro-looking signs proclaiming WELCOME TO LAS VEGAS – even though, technically, the airport and much of what was known as Vegas was contained in an area, not even a town, called Paradise. Well, that was how it was advertised. Desert End wasn’t in Paradise, which I appreciated the bitter humor in. Not Paradise, but now, I think, not Hell either. Just earth. I wondered if Desert End still existed in the same way it did all those years ago, when developers had named it for people with a taste for adventure like my father, who wanted to live in what was advertised as the end of the desert, the end of the world, the beginning of a new life. Come westward for empty land, all yours, and opportunities as plentiful as stars over the desert sky. The Old West all over again, Manifest Destiny for a new age, advertising a vision of a past that never really was, turning out to be a future that never came about. A failed expedition, though not for lack of trying.</p><p>Slava yawned, bringing me back into the moment. “You know, no matter how many times I go on an airplane, and you know how many times it’s been,” she nudged me with her elbow and shook her head, her hair falling around her shoulders, “I never get used to being stuck in one place for so many hours,” she said, with a tone of distaste. I don’t think her issue was being in one place in and of itself, but being stuck. I could certainly sympathize. My fear of crowds and claustrophobia had gotten better over the years, but in moving vehicles, it hadn’t ever been as bad as it was when I was in buildings. The car or bus or airplane, I knew, was taking me somewhere else, somewhere far away, and could easily take me back, but for the time being all I’d have to do was let myself give in to the freedom of the in-between time of going somewhere, not being there yet, being on the road. It was one of those questions I sometimes wondered about, but never said, for fear that I was entirely wrong: didn’t everyone love the idea of escape, if only for a brief time? I guessed I still did, at least, I didn’t mind it in general. I still wasn’t sure how I felt here. But then, I was only in the airport, surrounded by stewardesses and retired tourists with destination t-shirts and large maps of the Strip, rather than being surrounded by living reminders of exactly what my life had been here.</p><p>“Well,” I said, my luggage hanging heavily from my shoulder- it would leave a mark on my skin like a too-tight spaghetti strap, I could already tell- “we can do something relaxing first if you’d like.” If we were going to be efficient, we’d go outside and get a taxi to the hotel, leave our things there, and then decide on what to do. Not that I was feeling like being pushy about it. I noticed Slava was stopping to pull out her sunglasses from some pocket deep in her jacket.</p><p>She smiled at me crookedly, the sunlight glinting off her blue tinted glasses frames. I could see her eyebrows rise. “Oh. Now this is a nice romantic getaway,” she said, “you should have told me.” I looked around, hoping she wouldn’t think I was nervous, but no one seemed to even notice us. Maybe I was thankful for that, I thought to myself. Maybe I didn’t want just anyone to have the right to know what we were to each other, after all we’d been through together. But Las Vegas tourists could be like that, focused on the sights they came to see rather than their fellow pedestrians. And maybe Slava’s voice wasn’t so loud as her words would seem to make them- in the past, I wondered, how many times had I willed myself into being quieter and quieter, so I could seem less noticeable, less <em>there</em>. </p><p>“If it shows you how to calm down,” I said evenly.</p><p>“Who is going to show me? You?” she asked, laughing. She leaned to my ear, half-whispering. “I’m sure you’ll try.” I could feel her breath on my ear, and my face felt warmed. We were being intimate in a way, but no one around us was paying attention. Such was Vegas. Although I wondered if maybe Slava wouldn’t have minded more attention. However, she could be low-profile, and had been for these past weeks. I hadn’t asked her about it. A part of me guiltily wondered if she thought I didn’t want to be associated with her in any way at all. If she thought the only way she could possibly live a life out of her old lifestyle, or with me, or both, would be to live in the shadows of my life. We barely went out together back home. Maybe we were just appreciating the time together, especially since we’d only just gotten back together, but it was possible to do that outside of my house, too.</p><p>“Maybe,” I said gently, setting my eyes on hers. “I can do my best.”</p><p>“Hm,” she said approvingly. “Come on, my vixen, we should get a cab before this crowd gets outside.” We probably should have called ahead so there would be one ready for us, I thought, but things rarely went according to plan in our lives anyway, even in everyday matters. We began walking quickly, and I remembered being thirteen and walking through this same airport. I must have been walking through a different area, since I’d come from New York. It was still glittering and loud, full of twentieth-century nostalgia, Route 66 and Viva Las Vegas and vaguely 20<sup>th</sup> century visions of the Strip.</p><p>Slava took my hand, and we walked forward, slowly because of the weight of our bags, but further and further through the airport, looking for the exit, for the entrance out into the world, a part of the world we’d left years ago but hadn’t ever really left behind.</p><p>_</p><p>“Wow,” I’d said when we walked into our hotel room. Slava had been the one to come up with the idea to come to Vegas before she even came to my house, and she’d arranged the trip. (Myriam had helped her with finding a hotel, she’d told me.) I probably should have expected she’d choose a higher end hotel, even if Myriam hadn’t been helping her. The truth was, I always felt strange in environments like that. Five-star resorts were always a bit much for me, and I don’t think it was just because I’d come to associate ostentatious, stiff displays of wealth with my time in Park Avenue.</p><p>“I know!” Slava said, smiling at me, “fancy places like this”- here she outstretched her hands as she threw her duffel bag to the tiled floor- “sometimes it still feels unreal, that I can come in here, with my own money, in perfectly lawful circumstances.” She let herself fall back, her shoes still on, onto the large bed that had more pillows on it than seemed useful.</p><p>Looking out of the window onto the Strip, I thought of an old song my mother listened to, that I would listen to over and over on her iPod after she died: <em>strange young girls, covered in sadness, eyes of innocence hiding their madness, walking the Strip, sweet soft and placid, offering their youth on the altar of acid…</em>We’d come a long way, I thought. Sometimes returning can help you see that.</p><p>I’d begun to unpack my bags, putting my clothes in the very new, but well-constructed bureaus. “Don’t even bother, we will only be here a few days,” Slava told me.</p><p>“If I don’t they’ll get wrinkled,” I sighed, “so maybe you should bother.” I was quiet for a moment. “And I know I sound like a nag all the time but…” my voice sounded sardonic, but I meant it, I did have concerns about that. (Slava interjected here, <em>oh, Princess, you do not, stop worrying</em>. If I could, I suppose things would be a lot different, I didn’t say.) “I think we should, you know, go soon. If we don’t we’ll get distracted and we won’t get around to it. And it was your idea and I don’t want to…get you off the track of what you thought was best to do.” I didn’t outright say it, but it seemed to me that specifically visiting our fathers’ graves was something Slava thought was important to both of our healing processes, or closures, or whatever term you wanted to use. And I didn’t think I was an expert, but I also didn’t want to inadvertently cause her backing out of something like that, when I’d spent years wondering if she was alive, when she could have died so many times. We’d come here because we could, because we had lived through our dangerous childhoods, and maybe that was because our lives together happened there but not only there.</p><p>I was staring at the bureau drawers, looking at the smoothness of the wood, when I heard Slava’s footsteps.  Before I knew it, Slava was kneeling down next to me, the soles of her shoes tracking who knew what on the pristine floor that probably cost a fortune to install, possibly as much as some antique rugs or tiles. She put her arms around me, resting her chin on my shoulder. “I think we’re both ready,” she said, and I supposed she didn’t mean at this exact moment in the day so much as in this point in our lives. I closed my eyes and opened them. I could have stayed there on the ground all day with her, but I didn’t. We didn’t have to do things like that anymore, cling to each other for fear of being torn apart, losing track of the hours because time was meaningless when no one cared about us and we saw no reasons not to self-destruct, not to lie down and die. I remembered the two of us lying down in the middle of the night on the tiles next to the pool at my father’s house while we swore we heard a coyote howl in the distance, I remembered the two of us spending the weekend in a highway motel that was beginning to fall apart but we barely noticed- we didn’t know what peace was, and I don’t think either of us in those times could have conceived of where we were in our lives now. Sometimes I felt angry towards our younger selves, sometimes protective, sometimes nostalgic, but sometimes just sad.</p><p>So I let out a deep breath I hadn’t realized I was holding, and it came out far less shaky than I anticipated. “Cemeteries are supposed to be places of peace,” I said, shrugging, not sure how much I believed that, if I believed they always effectively gave peace to anyone. “I think we’re both ready for some of that.”</p><p>“I will call the cab,” Slava told me solemnly, getting up. “Unless you need any time?”</p><p>I shook my head. I had a feeling that if we didn’t do this now, we’d end up not doing it, or we’d end up arguing about specifics and somehow not getting anything out of it. Neither of us had eaten, but we weren’t good at doing things like that on any specific schedule, we’d get around to it, which probably wasn’t healthy, but we weren’t starving anymore, so that counted for something.</p><p>“I think it’s time,” I said. Looking back, I’m not sure if that was something she was waiting for me to say, so that she could hear it. Like our past here was some kind of jointly owned thing, and we were the only ones left to release each other from whatever remaining ties keeping us behind that we couldn’t release ourselves from.  </p><p>I closed my drawer full of folded clothes and got up. I could hear the heels of my boots tapping on the floor as I walked across the room, closer to the door. Not for the first time, I realized I was once again in a hotel room, far from home, making a decision that I’d consider to be central to my personal life. Maybe it was because I had such a difficult relationship with home that I was able to feel so at ease going in and out of these rooms. No one, including me, was expecting me to stay long. Just long enough to do what I needed to do. Sometimes I’d remembered Xandra warning me about running away, that the road I’d set out on would just stretch on forever behind me. I don’t know. Sometimes, I think, that whatever was behind me, when I went forward on the road, the space ahead was good to me.</p><p>Slava took my wrist, smiling with her mouth closed at me. “We should wait downstairs in the lobby,” she told me. I closed the door behind us. I wasn’t nervous at all, which I lately often wasn’t, but it never ceased to amaze me. I usually took it as something to be grateful for, something special I was given. Since our wrists were so close together, I could feel the quickness of Slava’s pulse.</p><p>“We did have good times here,” I told her. “I mean, I know how I was….and how your life was….but it’s like you said. There was good in there, in all that bad. I would see things in New York that would remind me…” I trailed off and saw she was smiling.</p><p>“You weren’t the only one,” she told me as if she was making me guess a secret. “In Miami I would always think of you,” she began, and told me more about her life in another place halfway across the country, the way I told her things through my journals, I suppose. In dense, vivid quilt-patches of the whole story, some of which I already knew, some I half-knew, some I’d never heard before. I wondered how long it would take for us to finish telling our past stories until we caught up with the present. But we were both ready to tell most of those stories, I realized, as I listened to her and we waited.</p><p>_</p><p>Slava was speaking under her breath, quickly and excitedly, telling me about her first night in Miami, how she slept on the beach and could only think of how she’d asked me to run away to California. The cab driver wasn’t listening, and probably couldn’t hear over the classics station playing loud enough to be heard outside of the closed windows, the soft guitar and wistful voice- <em>this love of mine had no beginning, it has no end, I was an oak, now I’m a willow, now I can bend…</em></p><p>I could feel the sand in my hair and mouth, like it had been me and not her. I used to tell myself we were so different, but we understood each other, I think because when our relationship had been forged, we had no other choice but to find understanding in each other. As she told me about Miami, I could feel its wet air after a hot rainy evening, I could hear the click of her Lucite heels as she danced on the stage, I could smell the makeup that she and her friends would put on each other. And in the present moment, when I saw the look in her eyes, I understood what she meant, when she told me about the man who said she was his favorite girl, the man who’d fought in Vietnam, and sometimes being around him made her think of that story in <em>The Things They Carried,</em> the one where the girl becomes a killer and disappears. Because when he talked about the war she remembered the story and how she’d thought of it so much in school, and it made her think of what she’d come from, and how that would always be what she’d come from, no matter where she went.</p><p>Our heads were close together, the closeness of people telling secrets, when the cab driver said, without turning around, “we’re almost there.”</p><p>Slava straightened up almost immediately, smiling broadly. “Thank you!” she called up front. I observed her and wondered how many times in her life she’d done that, gone from one face to another like it was nothing, with no acknowledgement of it. I wondered how many times I’d done it.</p><p>I swallowed hard as I could feel the cab begin to drive slower. “Look,” I said, without really intending to, my voice toneless and stiff. I could see some people by some headstones in the distance, but I still felt like I was breaking into ruins, or seeing something I wasn’t supposed to be shown.</p><p>“See,” Slava told me, softly, in what was probably meant to be calming. “We made it, Princess, didn’t we?” I gave her a weak smile as she reached into her pockets and gave the driver what I assume was the best tip he’d ever gotten. I opened my door and kept my head down, looking at the ground, lost in thought as we walked out.</p><p>I hadn’t told her, but I’d done research. I’d looked the place up online when we were still in Massachusetts, to make sure we were going to the right one. We were right when we’d suspected both our fathers were buried in the same cemetery.  One of the webpages had a title about celebrity headstones at the cemetery- my father would have liked the association. I can’t say what Slava’s father would have thought of it. But I think she understood him better than anyone else ever did, I won’t deny her that- although he took her for granted and hurt her enough that I’m not sure if he ever even realized that about his daughter. I still can’t understand him, no matter how much she tells me about him, and I know she hasn’t told me everything, but I think no matter what I hear, I won’t be able to. (I told her as much and she looked at me sadly, then smiled. “How many of us can understand our own fathers? How many of us do not even understand ourselves?” she looked pointedly at me at that last question, and I rolled my eyes and said something to the effect of, don’t make this about problems I don’t even have anymore. But I knew what she meant. Sometimes truly understanding people, including yourself, is rare.)</p><p><em>Woodlawn Cemetery: City of Las Vegas </em>read the concrete sign. Places in that city are always reiterating that they are in fact in Vegas, as if anyone would forget. Some palm trees stood tall, not far away, and through the entranceway, I could see green leaves spreading out to the sky. I recalled reading Dante’s <em>Inferno </em>some years ago when I didn’t want people to talk to me at some weekend gathering in the Hamptons. <em>“And she began to say, gentle and low, …‘A friend of mine, and not the friend of fortune, upon the desert slope is so impeded…”</em></p><p>We had both stopped in front of the entrance to look at it. Slava’s head was cocked to the side and I knew I must have looked like a wilted flower, my head and shoulders down. I don’t know which one of us walked first. I’m ready, I told myself, we didn’t end up being buried here years ago, and there is nothing to fear.</p><p>After a few minutes Slava looked around, her movements reminding me of a hawk. “This place is fucking big,” she said. “At least we have the right place, I suppose.”</p><p>“Well,” I said quietly. “I don’t mind being here for a long time because we’re together. We’ve gotten through so many things together and-”</p><p>“And you plan on making a tradition out of this, I hope?” she said to me, half-smiling, but very much enjoying it. We were both quiet for a moment. “I know this is not easy for you,” she said. “When I decided to come I did not do it because I thought it would be easy for me. And when I invited you I did not do it without thinking of how it would be for you. If I went without you and did not even ask, I thought, that would have been worse.” She sounded almost apologetic. </p><p>“I know,” I said. “You’re…you’re right.” We had linked arms, and I felt a cool breeze blow my hair into my face. When I pushed it out of the way I looked around us. Slava just seemed to be walking without any purpose, as if she wanted to take it all in. All the people who didn’t make it out of this city, all the people whose entire lives had been here, who would forever be memorialized by this city.</p><p>“I think,” I told her, “since neither of them would have been buried in older family plots, they would probably be among where the newer sections are.” It was the mid-afternoon on a Saturday, and there was a number of people in the cemetery, but not a crowd. I’d barely ever been to any cemeteries since my mother died. She was never given a real funeral, and by the time I met Hobie, Welty had already been laid to rest. I left Vegas right after my father had died, right before he was cremated. I found out about Andy and Mr. Barbour too late and even if I hadn’t, I wonder if seeing them being laid to rest wouldn’t have been yet another thing I would be considered not stable enough to handle seeing- I really want to think I would have gone anyway, had I known. Other than that, I hadn’t really known anyone who had died. Death had defined my life such, that I would be distanced from so many people in the world.</p><p>Sometimes I wondered what happened to Martin’s body. No matter what Slava told me- and we don’t speak of it often, but I wonder if sometimes we should- I still wonder.</p><p>And sometimes I wondered what would have happened if I had died with my mother, if anyone would have claimed us, if anyone would have come to the morgue to positively identify us. This, I’d thought of regularly as a teenager, when I’d spend hours looking up Jane Does- I’d wonder not only of Slava could be one of them, but if things had gone differently, would my mother and I have been buried as Mother and Daughter Doe on Hart Island. When I was younger I often felt that there was a world the two of us shared and no one else was a part of, and in a sense, we were alone, but it was all right as long as we had each other. I was confused when so many of her old friends from her modeling days visited her when she died. Where had they been when she was alive? Had they drifted apart years before, and only heard because of the news, and felt it was only right to pay one last tribute to an old friend?  </p><p>“Hey, Princess, did you hear me?” Slava asked. Apparently, I hadn’t; I had completely zoned out, barely paying attention to where we were walking. I turned to her, biting my lip, a single tooth pinching hard at my mouth. She was smiling wryly. “You were right. I think we are at the newer section.”</p><p>The headstones looked polished, silvery gray and gleaming onyx black and clouds of pastel rose quartz. Some of them had color pictures of the people on them. Some, in the distance, were markers like small signs. Flat on the fresh, green grass were some memorial plaques. I adjusted my glasses, that had begun to fall down my nose. It wasn’t too crowded with stones and I wondered if I had been wrong, if ten years ago was too far back to be in the newer section. It was then that out of the corner of my eye I noticed Slava kneeling on the ground like an archaeologist observing an ancient artifact, her hands clasped together thoughtfully. Her back was arched and her shoulders were up, but her face was still. As I walked closer, I saw her expression was pensive, but I thought she was all right. I didn’t say anything, and I knew I could ask later. This was between Slava and her father.</p><p>I saw her do what I assumed was her cross, Orthodox style – (Her family’s relationship to religion always seemed very convoluted to me- “I went to Bible school in Poland, very Catholic. But my father, he was not Catholic. Not really anything at all, his parents did not baptize him, but many Orthodox live in Ukraine and it is part of the culture of my upbringing in living there too, you know? And then of course you know I converted to Islam, but then I lapsed, and then I guess I was not affiliated with anything, have not officially been since…” she’d told me when I’d recently asked her, not knowing if I sounded stupid for assuming she was staying that long, that the Christmas season was coming and if she wanted to go to one of the churches around, I’d go with her, which set her talking of religion, and to my relief, nothing about how of course she was leaving soon.) Then she was silent. I don’t know how long. I just watched her, both of us still as the breeze made the grass, so green it almost didn’t look natural in a cemetery, wave back and forth.</p><p><em>Volodymyr Borysovych Pavlikovsky, 1970-2008</em> said the bronze stone. I didn’t understand him any more than I had a day ago. I saw Slava take a 50ml bottle of vodka out of her jacket pocket (where had she even gotten that?), open it up to drink from, and then leave the rest on the stone, her face solemn and still and clear as a lake in a photograph for a brochure on cruise vacations. Her fingers touched the stone, and she nodded, maybe to herself. Then she got up and turned to me.</p><p>I wanted to say something, but didn’t know what, and my throat was tight, and I could feel my eyes stinging. “You do not have to be sad for me, Theodora,” she said to me, gently, taking me by the shoulder. “Not about this, not anymore.” My mouth opened, and I must have looked lost. “Sure. Maybe sometimes I will still feel badly about things in the past that should not have happened but I cannot do anything about. But he was who he was, and I do not have to be him. You know, he talked so much about not wanting me to make his mistakes, but he raised me to be like him. That is exactly what he did, raised me to make his mistakes.” There was more confusion than bitterness in her voice. “Once he was all I had. Really, I had no one else in the world. And he said all we had in the world was each other. I realized we were both alone entirely. So even we did not really have each other.” I could hear her voice almost break, though she smiled a little, as if asking me to appreciate the irony. My nose was starting to run. “But…” she smiled a little, more genuine. “That is not so true, is it? Life did not have to be as bad as he thought it did. I know this now.” I was looking at the grass as we walked, seeing the rich earth between the sparser areas of blades- I was used to reflexively hiding my face when I cried. </p><p>“I don’t know why he was that way,” she said. “It was not just the alcohol. Sometimes I think after a certain point we no longer knew each other.”</p><p>Finally, I could think of something to say. “I know what you’re talking about,” I said, my voice coming out as a slow murmur. “It was like that for me. And my father.”</p><p>Slava, looking down still, nodded solemnly. “I know,” she said, her voice soft, almost faraway. She exhaled, long and hard.</p><p>Even as a young child, I’d never exactly consciously thought he loved me, even if I didn’t quite actively realize that he didn’t. When I began to notice how he was always angry at my mother, that was when I realized there were many sides of him, and some of those sides represented his truer self better than others. <em>A shit inheritance to leave your only daughter, nice job giving me the con artist genetics and absolutely nothing else of use</em>; I would always think every time I reflected on that. I suppose part of me had stopped feeling so tied down by him, had stopped being so haunted. But I knew I never really understood him entirely, and neither had my mother and I doubt Xandra did either, and I’m not sure who did. I don’t know why he was the way he was- what was caused by the alcohol, his own painful upbringing, the pills, and what was always there, and what parts I’d never seen or known about. I didn’t blame myself for his death anymore, partially because his death was another mystery to me, and while I could guess, I knew I’d never have the answer.</p><p>We walked for a while. The people in the distance, I wondered if they saw us, if they wondered about us the way I would wonder about people I saw- their everyday lives, their secrets, why they were out doing what it was they were in the middle of. Who were people seeing when they looked at us? I’d been asking that question to myself for years, beginning as some kind of game. But I was really asking myself how people saw me, what I meant to other people.</p><p>“Hey,” Slava said to me, her fingers around my arm pressing into my skin. “Here it is, I think.”</p><p>I felt my eyes close, then reopen. The sun blazed down, and I wished I’d brought sunglasses. “Where,” I said. I didn’t want to look around to find it, I didn’t want it to take me by surprise. I wanted to see it for the first time directly. In that moment, I felt that I didn’t want to be there any longer than necessary. Being in this surreal cemetery, surrounded by palm trees, was a lurid reminder to me that Slava or I, or both of us, could have been buried here years ago, resting alone prematurely in eternity in this city we never truly knew.</p><p>Before I knew it, Slava was in front of me, her hands holding my face. The familiar roughness of her palms comforted me as I felt her hands slide over me, grasping me. “Is all right,” she told me, her voice gentle. “Everything is all right now.” She let one hand drop and gestured towards a small white headstone. I looked at it, let my mind process what I was seeing.</p><p>The stone, veined with gray, said <em>Lawrence Decker, 1960-2006. </em>There was an engraving of the comedy and tragedy masks- I wondered if Xandra had chosen that because she really loved him after all and wanted him to be remembered as the actor he saw himself as, or because my father’s life was theatrical and dramatic right to the confounding end, and the remaining audience was left to interpret the finale and its fallout for ourselves. She’d cremated him, and yet chosen a stone like this, that had to cost a significant amount of money even if it wasn’t extravagantly large, when she was out of money and needed every cent to save herself from her dealers who would have killed her. I wondered, had I stayed with her, if they would have killed me too.  </p><p>I found myself standing in front of it, inspecting the stone. Nothing had been left on it- Xandra, from what I knew, had left for Reno soon after Slava moved out, and that had been it. (A memory came, unbidden, Xandra coming home late, telling the two of us as we lounged on the couch and tried to quiet our voices when she came in- “you know, I know you girls think I’m against you or something, but I didn’t have it any easier than you did when I was your age. I know what it was like to be like you.” She seemed to really mean it, I’d thought, confused.)</p><p>I really hadn’t wanted him to die, but I hadn’t felt much of anything when it happened. And when I thought the painting could have helped him, I worried that I was at fault for his death. But I try not to blame myself for everything anymore. And wishing nothing had to be the way it was may not be any more productive than looking for someone to blame, but to me, it makes more sense now.</p><p>Did he mean to do it? I thought, not for the first time, though I’d never voiced it aloud. <em>Did you mean to do it like I meant to do it, Dad? Every week under your roof and I would forget the next morning and do it all over again the next night. Did you mean to do it the way I meant to when I overdosed? Did you ever even notice I was on drugs? Did you know and just think, oh, of course she ended up that way? </em>I wondered, this flood of questions more vague and sad than angry and articulated the way they may have been once. <em>Look, I’ll talk to you as an adult if it counts for anything. I’m not afraid of you anymore and I’m not mad anymore. I’ll just talk honestly now. Slava brought me here. She’s still alive. And so am I, and just the fact that I have to say that… Fortune, if that’s what you want to call it, hasn’t been so good to me, either, Dad, but sometimes it is, and sometimes it just isn’t there at all. I don’t have to run anymore. I don’t have to die. I don’t have to live like you anymore. </em></p><p>When Slava knelt by her father’s grave, I thought then, she must have thought the same thing, or something close enough.</p><p><em>Goodbye, Dad</em>, I thought, <em>you never said it to me, not once, but I’ll say it now. </em></p><p>I turned around. “Slava,” I said, “I think I’m done. I think-” I paused for a moment, not even sure why- “I think we should leave now.”</p><p>“Are you all right, Princess?” Slava asked me, taking my hand.</p><p>I nodded, turning my head to look at her so she wouldn’t think I’d completely zoned out into some blank trauma state. “Yeah,” I said, “I think I’m all right now.” </p><p>We walked down the street before calling for a cab- I think Slava didn’t want me to have to wait by the cemetery, maybe she didn’t want to be there any longer, either. When we got our taxi I rested my head on her shoulder, and she put her arm around me.</p><p>“I never would have thought to go if you hadn’t brought it up,” I said quietly, not just meaning Vegas but the cemetery. </p><p>“I know,” she said, “I do not think I would have ever been able to come without you.” She didn’t specify if she meant Vegas in general or the cemetery, but I think she meant the cemetery, even if she also meant the city. She placed a kiss on top of my head, maybe to lighten the moment, maybe because she really felt joy in her heart in the moment, maybe both- I often had this exact question when Slava did things, but I didn’t ask. I wasn’t even thinking about whether the taxi driver had seen, and wondered if that meant I was better somehow, but then, of course, he wouldn’t have been looking back at us as he drove anyway.</p><p>There was too much death that we were surrounded by. It would always be part of our past, our upbringing, our family, what had made us who we were. We didn’t need to let it invade us anymore. We’d spent years thinking we were supposed to be dead. But we’d never been the types to do what we were supposed to do, and we were alive. I looked out the back window, one last look at the cemetery. Goodbye, I thought. To our fathers, and to the other specters that had haunted me, the other, and plausible, versions of Slava and myself that had died in this city and never made it out. They were all right now. <em>You’re going to get through this,</em> I thought, imagining the two of us years ago, jumping into the pool at night, lying down on the carpet as the air conditioner froze us, <em>I’m so sorry, please forgive me, I don’t know if any of this ever really goes away completely. You’re not going to be all right yet, not for a long time. And I know you forgot how to live, or no one ever showed you how. But you’re going to. And one day you’ll learn how. </em></p><p>“You are so quiet,” Slava asked me in the taxi. “What are you thinking about?” She’d been quiet too. I could have asked her the same.</p><p>“Us,” I told her, “the people we were when we lived here.”</p><p>“Same people,” she said, raising the corner of her mouth.</p><p>“We’ve been so many,” I replied. “But still the same, all the time.” I felt her chest rise and go down as she breathed. I hoped that we didn’t have to be many people anymore. That we wouldn’t ever again. It didn’t look entirely unlikely. For a moment I felt so tired, that I could have almost fallen asleep right in that cab. <em>It takes me all the way, and I want you to stay, </em>came the music on the radio, languid and calming.</p><p>“I think we should do something fun later,” Slava said to me.</p><p>“All right,” I agreed.</p><p>“Hm,” she inflected without opening her expressive mouth, raising her black eyebrows. In her face, you could always tell she was thinking something, but couldn’t always tell what. “So you agree.”</p><p>I rolled my eyes, bemused. “I never said any of this was a bad idea or I didn’t want to or anything, you know.”</p><p>“No. You did not. So it is your idea too,” she raised her chin and widened her eyes like she was about to laugh, giving the impression of a saucy courtesan in some Renaissance painting, in velvets and jewels and holding a musical instrument or flowers.</p><p>I shrugged. “Sure,” I said. “That’s fine by me.” Then she was laughing, and we were both laughing, and the taxi driver was telling us we’d be at our destination in five minutes and Slava was reaching into her pockets, deep in concentration, and I didn’t feel tired anymore, the brief spell of afternoon exhaustion over as if it hadn’t happened. But it had, I knew all of it had. And now, what I knew, I did my best to remember. And what I didn’t know, I was aware of. But it didn’t have to hurt me anymore.</p><p>_</p><p>Back at the hotel, we’d gotten room service, which we’d both eaten on the bed together, even though I’d said maybe we should try and eat at one of the tables; this was, after all, a rather large hotel room. But we were careful not to get anything on the covers, I made sure.</p><p>“One of us has to be careful,” Slava said, facetiously but I still laughed, as she raised her glass dramatically. “Anyway. We should use the rest of this afternoon to relax.”</p><p>“Let me guess. You have an idea for going out tonight,” I said. Slava laughed, tilting her head back.</p><p>“I suppose you would not mind if I told you now?” she said, after a moment of quietness that I didn’t know what to make of. For a moment, I was worried she’d bought my father and Xandra’s old Desert End house, even though as the thought came to me, I couldn’t see why she would have a reason to do it if the house even still stood. And I did not know whether or not it did.</p><p>“Sure,” I said, my voice coming out a bit unevenly. Sometimes I didn’t know what to expect when the two of us got together, and that was sometimes fine, we weren’t living hard like we used to so that the possibility of unexpectedness would make me stare at the ceiling miserably or cry myself to sleep, but sometimes it caught me off guard.</p><p>Slava got off the bed and walked over towards the nearby white-painted chair, where her half-empty black and silver Adidas duffel bag was hanging. She unzipped one of the inside pockets and took out something small between her thumb and index finger, and it looked familiar, and as she walked closer I realized I was in fact correct in what I thought it looked like.</p><p>“Uh…” I thought, barely keeping myself from yelling, <em>what the fuck, </em>not wanting to ask what I couldn’t help but think, asking instead what I thought was the safest question: “where did you find that?” Which certainly was a question that could be answered pretty obviously and easily, more than anything else I could ask. I kept a lot of my jewelry in or around this box on top of my bureau back in the house, and among those items was the green tourmaline ring Kit hadn’t let me give back to him, when he’d given it back to me. My burden, not his, even though he didn’t say that, he said something euphemistic but obvious I didn’t even bother to deny about how he wouldn’t want to give something that was meant for me to someone else one day, and it could be for me one day, and he truly was sorry for a lot of things including that he hadn’t <em>known</em>.</p><p>Slava raised her eyebrows. “Hm,” she said, “this is your first reaction. Well, better than saying no.” I gave her an uneasy smile. I still wasn’t really comprehending that this was happening- it wasn’t something I’d ever considered really happening. “Okay. It was right with your other things. I recognized it immediately, from when I saw you at your engagement party.”</p><p>I closed my eyes. “We really don’t have to talk about all that right now,” I said.</p><p>“No, no,” she waved her hand as if to assure me, “but thinking about it might make the contrast seem better, no?” I didn’t say anything, I knew she was in the middle of one of her rants and couldn’t think of what to say. “Anyway, I saw it, and the idea came to me. I thought this would be a good place, because it is just us two, and you do not have to worry about all the people coming after you and judging you and telling stories about you. I know how much that hurts you. But here, it is not like that, there is peace, in the most crazy place we have ever been, kind of like when we were young.” I didn’t ask her if she thought Amsterdam, a place where we’d committed a murder, was more chaotic. “My point is,” she raised her finger, “I took it here thinking we should get married.” Which was what I had thought she was going to say since I saw the ring a few minutes ago, and so I wasn’t entirely surprised even though I was still in a state of disbelief, but I would have been surprised if you’d told me an hour ago, a day or a week ago that this would happen.</p><p>Something struck a deep place inside of me, going over her words. I didn’t know whether to throw my arms around her or curl myself under the bedding. Peace in the most crazy place we’d ever been- that was what we’d come here for, hadn’t we? And maybe that was something we’d had here, so many years ago, even if it was just in small pieces we had to share like everything else. And when I thought about the fact that she’d thought to marry me in Las Vegas because no one I knew would be watching and she’d thought I’d be less uncomfortable and self-conscious, I didn’t know whether to be moved by the intimacy and mutual understanding we had, or to be even more self-conscious that no matter what I did, no matter how much time went by, I’d still be afraid of other people seeing me, knowing things about me. I hoped Slava knew it wasn’t a problem with her, it wasn’t as if I thought she was beneath me, and didn’t want to be associated with someone like her. That wasn’t it. Even when I was engaged to Kit, I thought, I wouldn’t be able to do it, I couldn’t see myself walking down an aisle of a church that wasn’t and never would be mine or my family’s with only a few people on my side, spending hours at the center of a reception where everyone was analyzing and photographing and staring at every move I made and no one really wanting me there. But that was just the beginning. Part of me always thought, I wouldn’t know how to be Kit’s wife. I didn’t have it in me. And Slava wasn’t asking me to do anything that was ever asked of me in Park Avenue, I knew that. But there were times I still wondered how much of me would be closed off, secluded, forever. I didn’t know if I could do it, being together with her- but I’d been doing it recently well enough, I thought.</p><p>I realized I’d gone silent and was looking at my hands. More quietly than I thought my voice would come out, I said, “are you sure,” my voice trailing off. I swallowed hard, feeling my throat tighten.</p><p>She placed the ring on top of my hands. “Yes,” she said vehemently, “yes, of course I am. It is your choice. But, you should know that I am completely certain.”</p><p>I remember as a child thinking how unfair it was that my mother had married and stayed with someone she didn’t love and who didn’t love her. She’d made it clear she didn’t want that for me, always telling me to never feel pressured by anyone, to not settle for anyone, to not stay with someone who made me unhappy. She probably wouldn’t feel that it was a very productive choice for me to turn down being happy with someone who was alongside me as I learned to be safe and happy and all right, all because I was insecure and afraid. If I was afraid, I didn’t have to be alone.</p><p>I pushed the ring onto my finger, and looked at it for a moment before I looked up again. “Then…” I began, breathing in. I didn’t exactly feel afraid, so much as daunted by the realization that, when confronted with it, I wanted this and would accept it. I don’t know if even a year before I would have been able to, but then, I don’t know if a year back Slava would have been able to get to that point either. “Then I’m certain I want to make that choice too,” I said, trying to make my voice even as possible.</p><p>I heard Slava exhale, but didn’t say anything about it. I suppose it was understandable that she’d wonder if I wouldn’t say no, or react badly. I said yes and wanted to, but I could barely keep myself together as it was.</p><p>“Can I just ask something,” I began. Slava was already at my side, holding my left hand, her fingers over mine, the jewel in between our hands.</p><p>“Of course. Anything,” she leaned toward me and her untamable hair draped over my shoulder, tickling my neck.</p><p>“When did you- I mean, at what point did you decide to…ask….” I realized with frustration I’d probably be visibly self-conscious throughout our ceremony, which was sure to be at one of those Vegas wedding chapels.</p><p>“I mean, I always thought it would be a good idea,” she shrugged. “Back when we were young and they were always debating it on your American news, it was very informative to me. I thought one day if it was legal maybe we could do it! One thing I didn’t think I’d know how to do outside of the law!” This was news to me, even if it shouldn’t have surprised me now, I never would have guessed it then. “And now,” she outstretched her hand in a broad gesture, “we do not have to. But, your question,” her voice grew more solemn, “when I found you just a few weeks ago. That was when I thought, maybe we had made it far enough in life without dying. We could be alive together.” </p><p>“So…” I began, “don’t we need to get registered or…” Slava put her fingertip to my forehead, gently tapping, her long and pointed nail slightly poking at me.</p><p>“So practical. No wonder you’ve done all the things you did,” she said, satisfied. “Well, mine was already taken care of. I had a feeling you would say yes.” I did not know how to respond to that, but she kept on talking, so I didn’t have to. “Yours will take no time if we go get it done now and in Nevada there is no waiting period for using the license. So we are in the right place, no?”</p><p>“….Did you ask me here for this,” I said then, not sure if I should ask, wondering if it was presumptuous.</p><p>Slava looked like she had to think about it for a moment. “Actually, not exactly at first. But when I realized I would not face my father alone, it got me to thinking about the city. Then I realized. I just did not want to overwhelm you or scare you off by telling you beforehand.” She smiled. “I thought it would be a nice surprise.” I had no idea why she would think I particularly liked to be surprised, but let it go. Because, I realized, it was nice. It was nicer than I would have thought of any of the possibilities for this trip. It was something I’d never allowed myself to think about. She looked at my hand slyly, her dark eyes shifting like flickering candle lights. “I suppose it was.” Yes, I supposed it was. She already knew how much I wasn’t quite used to nice things, though, even if they were becoming more and more ingrained in my life.</p><p>“Yeah,” I said softly, half-laying down, our backs against the headboard of the bed, surrounded by pillows. I leaned against her, my head resting at her neck. We lay like that for a moment. Holding onto one another had once been one of our few defenses against being alone and afraid. It still never failed.</p><p>“Hey Princess,” Slava said into my ear after a little while. “Why not get moving? We can lie here together all night,” she lowered her voice. It made me want to close my eyes and just let her whisper to me like that all afternoon, but we’d have other times for that.</p><p>I shook my head, almost laughing, as I raised myself upwards. “This is why you asked me about what I was packing,” I said, realizing I was raising my eyebrows the way she did when she’d figured something out or was correct in a prediction.</p><p>“But you did not even guess why!” Slava cried out, amused. “I really thought you would have.” She nodded as if to affirm she was telling the truth.</p><p>“Well….” I said, thinking <em>how was I supposed to know?</em> looking through what I’d hung up in the spacious closet, “I thought you said it was a surprise.”</p><p>“Wait, wait. You really did not even guess?” Slava asked me, leaning forward, her bare arms, slightly tanned from today’s outing, dangling off the side of the bed.</p><p>No, I hadn’t. I didn’t think it was only out of insecurity, though. It just had never occurred to me. I suppose I had been so wrapped up in thinking of myself as a failed wife that I didn’t consider the possibility that I could genuinely love and be loved without anything awful happening to either of us. Only in the past few weeks had I even begun to process that we were both learning to do that, safe and together and living on our own terms. Then, I thought, it made perfect sense- as soon as it happened, Slava had decided to take the opportunity exactly when she saw it. We hadn’t been handed much good in our lives, after all, especially good that had lasted.</p><p>I had focused my attention on a few dresses that were hanging up, but I turned around. “No,” I said, shaking my head. “But…” I smiled a little. What better way for the two of us to really commemorate how we’d lived to tell the tale of our Vegas years?  I looked away from her, self-conscious of the idea of saying this to her face, even though we were both physically close to one another now that Slava had gotten off the bed to take a small dress from her bag that looked suspiciously similar to the one that she’d worn to my engagement party. I looked closer. Of course, it was exactly that. I put a hand to my mouth. “It makes sense. Us doing it, here and now, this way.” I knew it, but saying things like that so plainly was something I barely ever did. I didn’t want Slava to think I wanted to hide her away and only be with her where no one we knew would see us. I hoped she didn’t think that of me.</p><p>“I knew you would think so,” Slava told me. “Is perfect for both of us! And,” she added with a theatrical tone, “we do not even have to stay out too late if you do not like. The decisions are all ours. I really think it is going to be like that now,” she said, earnestly, more seriously, pulling her dress over her head. She then shook her hair to get it out of her face.  I realized we were about to be married but I still felt it was more tactful to not stare at her getting dressed and to instead focus on my own clothes.  </p><p>“If I didn’t know better,” I told her, inclining my hands over my torso in reference to her dress, “I’d have thought you’d been planning this ever since then.” She looked down at herself and laughed.</p><p>“If that were true I would have saved us both a lot of time, no?” I couldn’t help but laugh either. We both could have stood to have wasted less time, but there was nothing we could do about that now but make up for it.</p><p>I looked down at my ring. It felt more like it was mine, now. I could wear it with my mother’s earrings whenever I liked, and no one would ever glare at me or have anything to say about it again, because that wasn’t my life anymore, and the ring no longer belonged to someone whose life that was. I thought of Hobie’s explanation, long ago, about what antiques were - they were objects that had lived lives. Maybe it wasn’t only antiques.</p><p>I told Slava I was going to go get ready and I might be a while. When I came back into the room I didn’t have any shoes on yet but my hair was combed, I’d washed my face and put on some makeup, and decided on a vintage dress that reached near the floor, dark green velvet and white lace on the bodice, and lighter green, flowing sleeves, and a dark green skirt with small, light green flowers.</p><p>(I used to love wearing green, as a child, because it reminded me of my mother. She said it complimented me, language from the fashion world I’d been so fascinated by. One of the bridal shop employees in my Park Avenue days had gravely commented on my idea to wear my mother’s earrings on <em>the big day</em> with this comment, “Hm. The hue on those earrings certainly accentuates your dark complexion, doesn’t it?” in a tone that suggested that this would be the worst thing in the world.)</p><p>“You are so beautiful,” Slava said when she saw me, holding out a small jewelry box. She was, too, I thought. Her thick hair, her sharp bone structure, her deep eyes that told a thousand stories. “I thought you would want this. I found them in your jewelry box at home.” She gave me a small smile, looking me over. I assumed the way she was, she was ready, with knee-high boots that made me automatically envision the floor becoming scuffed beyond repair, and some eyeliner, and of course, the dress that had brought such controversy (and been worn by the controversy) to Park Avenue. I wanted to laugh at the irony, but I didn’t want to seem like I was laughing at her or what she was giving me, and I didn’t want to bring up the topic if she asked why I was laughing.</p><p>I walked over and took it from her hands, opening it. Inside were my mother’s earrings, and I couldn’t have said I was completely surprised. Nonetheless, my throat tightened and my hands shook a little as I put them in my earlobes.</p><p>“You are all right? You are not upset?” Slava asked. “We only will do this if you are sure, and if I -“ I surprised myself with the urgency with which I grabbed onto her hands and shook my head, blinking my eyes before any tears could come, although I was sure the beginning of them had to have been visible.</p><p>“I am all right, Slava. I’m sure. It’s just…a lot. I know it’s a lot for you too. Because it’s a good thing. And…and if things had gone differently, we both know we wouldn’t be together, maybe neither of us would even be alive. I’m not used to being all right. But I want to be. And I want you to be. I want us to try to do that now.”</p><p>“Blood of my heart,” Slava said to me, holding onto my hands, and pulling them close to her. “I think that is what we have been doing pretty well so far, from what I have seen.” She gave me a crooked half smile, the one I recognized from when we were just kids.</p><p>“Let’s go,” I told her, putting on my shoes as I walked towards the door, feeling like I wanted to go as fast as I could, feeling like I didn’t mind staying up all night even though we had to be on an airplane in the afternoon tomorrow. In the moment, everything we, myself included, were doing and could do made perfect sense to me.   </p><p>_</p><p>Later that night, we’d gotten to the venue. The air was breezy, but not cold, the winds wavering around me like cool water running down my throat.  I could just close my eyes and let the air wash over me. The sky was a deep blue: <em>Bluer than velvet was the night, softer than satin was the light, from the stars</em>, like the familiar song…though, contrary to being like the blue velvet skies, we looked rather mismatched in my green renaissance Gunne Sax (which Slava had informed me so many times I was beautiful in, and I’d always had a hard time seeing that in myself, but I could tell she meant it) and her edgy, revealing Versace, which I told her I loved and was perfect for her. Although, in Vegas, you can see everything and not be surprised. I supposed we didn’t stand out that much, in comparison.</p><p>She was beautiful, she really was, even if she’d said on more than one occasion she wasn’t. Just by looking at her, on a regular day, you could tell she’d lived a live that “eventful” didn’t even begin to describe. In her short black dress and tall boots, and wild hair; her usually bedecked hands only wearing one ring (she’d told me she’d chosen one to be her own wedding ring; it had a springtime green peridot set in it, a color I rarely saw her in- “so it can be a match to yours”), her angular face only wearing smoky black eyeliner and no other cosmetics, she looked like she could handle anything. She looked just as captivating and unusual and completely nonjudgmental and welcoming as she had when I’d first met her.</p><p>With the two of us out at night together, it was reassuring, the happiness I felt. Like no one could stop us. It still could feel that way, I realized. Even when no one would be trying to stop us anymore. Being free to just go about our lives and do what we wanted was something we’d fought for every inch of the way- no wonder we always enjoyed it so much, even as adults. In the distance I could hear what heard like the whole world. (I vaguely remembered something from childhood, me and Slava and Kotku, all three of us lying on the ground next to the pool. “Where I live, next to the highway,” Kotku told us, “it’s like watching the whole world pass by. It’s like living on a blood vein and you can feel the heart beating when everyone goes by…” Slava took me by the wrist, feeling my pulse, putting it to her forehead. I closed my eyes and tried to think of the whole world, all in one place, but couldn’t, all I could think about was being right there.)</p><p>We did have to wait a little while, since we had only booked our reservation a few hours before, but not for too long- November, apparently, despite being a tourist month as was every month in the year in Las Vegas, wasn’t <em>the </em>biggest tourist month, so it wasn’t as crowded as it could have been. It was really breathtaking sometimes, that I’d officially lived in Las Vegas for so long but didn’t know so many obvious facts about it, and yet it was a part of me, in a way.</p><p>We’d agreed on a civil ceremony, despite a religious ceremony being offered- it’s not that we had anything against a religious ceremony on principle, but I wasn’t certain how I’d even want a religious ceremony to go for me, and the chapel employed a minister of the Protestant faith, which didn’t really align with much of what Slava knew of religion, or, come to think of it, what I knew, either. So, without saying that much, we’d both said the civil ceremony made more sense for us.</p><p>“I see you are smiling,” Slava pointed out to me. “<em>Tsarevna Nesmeyana</em>, the Princess Who Never Smiled, she turned away all the men who did not make her laugh. But then, the last suitor made her smile, and then she was wed. That was how the story ended.” She put her arm around my shoulder, drawing me in closer to her as we walked on. Of course I knew how the story ended- even if she hadn’t told the whole thing to me years ago, I would have looked it up, wanting to know the source of this name she’d bestowed on me.</p><p>I didn’t move away from her. I laughed, because she was right, because I could. In the rental car we’d gotten, we drove through the chapel’s tunnel- its entryway in lights; nearby, the chapel’s neon sign pointing into the sky. Inside, the tunnel glowed blue, a painted night sky with stars and cherubs and flowery script like a romance novel- <em>I love you…I need you…</em>beneath, the tunnel was framed by white wrought iron and sculpted green plants and bright pink flowers in white plant holders, cream walls, almost Floridian in its picturesque, retro flamboyance. The bouquet we’d gotten scented the interior of the car with roses, like it was spring. But we didn’t mind that it was November. It was almost December, the beginning of winter, the year’s finale, like the final movement of a chamber music composition.</p><p>If you had told me ten years I’d be here, I wouldn’t have believed you. I don’t think even until recently I would have been able to accept that I would actually do something like this, that I would want to. But things weren’t the same anymore. Sure, I didn’t think I would have wanted a more public ceremony, a more typical one. Maybe that was because I was still shy and insecure and didn’t know how to be myself when other people were watching. But I knew it wasn’t just that. It was because this was about me and Slava, and what we shared and survived and were and would be, and I think both of us felt that it felt right, to have something for just the two of us.</p><p>I wasn’t entirely sure how this drive-through wedding thing worked, having never done anything like that before, so at one point in the slow drive through the tunnel I just stopped the car. I undid my seatbelt and moved over to the passenger seat and got on top of Slava, not even knowing what to do, just holding onto her face for a moment, her legs between my thighs. I was vaguely aware that I was likely on camera. She moved her head towards my face and kissed me, hard and fast, and I leaned closer into her. In the distance I heard a group of motorcycles, their engines like racing pulses, like the roar of a wildcat. I dragged my hand through Slava’s masses of hair, pulling her closer to me. It went like that for a period of time I didn’t measure until something brought me back- the odd sight of a white horse statue.</p><p>“I’m sure there are other couples waiting,” I said, getting back into my seat, laughing nervously. </p><p>“Yah,” Slava shrugged, “but did they wait as long as we did?”</p><p>And so, in our mismatched clothes that nonetheless completely suited us, with only one bouquet and no witnesses except the ordained minister who had us take our vows, we were married in a drive-through tourist destination in Las Vegas, which was possibly the best decision we ever made together in that city.</p><p>The white gate, emblazoned with a heart, opened.</p><p>“You know,” Slava said thoughtfully, leaning back, looking to me. “In a sense, our lives have been linked together for years. Even without the painting, and all that. We were always going to be tied to one another for our whole lives.” She lifted half her mouth in a little smile. “It worked out for the better, though, no?”</p><p>I was not about to be one of those brides that cried at her own fucking wedding. (I thankfully hadn’t had a repeat of the time we’d recently gone to bed together and I’d cried, which made Slava think I was upset or hurt or remembering something bad and needed to stop, and I had to calm myself down and tell her I definitely wasn’t.) Especially since my first engagement was bad enough to justify me crying throughout the whole ceremony and reception, had we carried on. And I’d already gone through the work at getting my eyeliner on perfectly for the occasion. So, I blinked a little and waited a moment until I was confident my voice wouldn’t shake.</p><p>“It really did,” I said, realizing that this was our way of telling one another that we wouldn’t be saying goodbye anymore, we wouldn’t be leaving each other for unknown amounts of time, vanishing and maybe never coming back. Spending our lives together, we wouldn’t have to be so afraid about what was happening to the other one of us- we’d know. “I’ve…” I began, not knowing how to continue as I looked at the traffic. “I’ve wanted to be with you since we were kids. Even before I even thought it was possible we could do this, even before I ever thought about the idea we’d both become adults.”</p><p>“You know, Theodora, I did too,” she told me, putting her left hand on my right hand. “Even before I truly realized. I think in a lot of ways we have always been very similar.”</p><p>“I’m glad that we are,” I said. I was who I was, and I didn’t have to apologize for it or try to replace myself with a falsified version anymore.</p><p>I drove into the city, the lights all different colors, shining into the sky, no stars visible, as if night in the city was in a completely different world than night in the desert. “We can just go through the city for a while if you like,” I said, “before we go back to the hotel.” Even saying that last part sounded shockingly forward despite, or because of, the fact that we were legally married. I suppose I’d get used to it. If I’d gotten used to bad things, I supposed I could try and get used to good things.</p><p>“All right, Princess,” Slava said softly to me. “We will be – that expression in English. Seeing it with new eyes,” she said approvingly. I thought of all the things she’d been through not just in the deserts with me, with her father, but after I’d gone, right down to the Strip itself, and how she’d left, bruised and bleeding, resolved to make a getaway like an escaped captive.</p><p>When I looked at the Strip around me, laid out before me like a mass of jewels to choose from on a queen’s vanity, it felt different from how I’d remembered it as a child. Maybe because I’d only seen part of it then, maybe because some of it really did change over the years, maybe because I was paying attention to certain things and kept those things at the top of my memory rather than others, maybe because my experience now was so different from my experience then- maybe it was all of these things.</p><p>I understood why people loved it as a novelty, as an escape- it was unique, exciting, sensuous, the sight of it promising with possibilities. But I understood, then, why people loved it in deeper ways, as their home. It was both tangibly real and a fantastical place of legendary history, both with sides of genuine beauty and desolate misfortune. Maybe this is why so many Americans don’t think anyone should vacation for too long in Vegas. Maybe they think that because you get used to it- I think we did, in our youths. But we weren’t tourists. We were returning to a place that was once home. I think sometimes home is the place you have when you have nowhere else. But sometimes, it can be a much better place.</p><p>“I think,” Slava said to me, with that philosophical tone she sometimes took on that still had a hint of enjoyment of what she was talking about, “the city is out of the red to me, you know?” </p><p>“I forgive it,” I said, turning to her, aware of how strange of a statement that was, but saying it anyway. Because I think I finally loved it- saw it as something that could be loved. I loved the girls we’d been, then, trying to make our situation in this place we’d been so overwhelmed in better by trying to add good experiences to our multitude of horrific and traumatic ones.</p><p>“Hey, hey,” Slava put her hand on my shoulder after a moment. “You are crying? Did you remember some-”</p><p>I shook my head before she could continue the variant on a question she’d had to ask me too many times, and I’d had to ask her too many times myself. “I’m fine,” I said, “Fuck- I didn’t even realize…” I took a deep breath, attempting to pull over to the side of the road, hoping none of the drunk tourists would think I was their Uber and try to open the doors. I rubbed my hands over my face and eyes, streaked lines of eyeliner coming off on my hands. “It’s just…” I held out my hands. “Everything we went through here and everything we survived. But there was good in there. Like you said. Sometimes the good and the bad are together…” This was just getting worse the more I tried to articulate myself, I thought. “I mean…I didn’t think I’d ever want to be here. I didn’t ever think I could be happy here, and feel safe here, but I do, and. I feel good. When I first came here I never wanted to feel good again, and I didn’t think I could. And I thought I’d never be able to tell you how much I loved you. I thought it would only ever be better when I was dead. But now, these days. It’s not just that I want to be alive. It’s that I really do <em>feel</em> alive.”</p><p>By then Slava had climbed over to the driver’s seat and had sort of attempted to share it with me, holding me in her arms, smiling sadly, understanding in her eyes. She kept nodding enthusiastically as I spoke. Even when I was crying, I didn’t feel sad- just completely overwhelmed, like I didn’t know what to do with everything that had been inside of me, some of it for years, some of it more recent, all powerfully running through my bloodstream. And now, being let out.  </p><p>“I’m- I really didn’t mean for all that…” I said, trying to calm myself down. At least we’d gotten nice pictures of us before I’d fucked up my face like a water-damaged painting. I tried to just breathe, in and out, like my more helpful therapist had done with me.</p><p>“Is fine. Do not worry,” Slava assured me, holding my face in her hands. “Okay? I know what you were saying. I felt all those things too,” she smiled ruefully, “and now? I am feeling like you. Just learning how to feel good, good for <em>real</em>.” She laughed a little; I sniffed and tried to smile back at her.</p><p>“Yeah,” I said. She was sitting on her knees, half of her on my lap, but she wasn’t that heavy. We stayed there for a while, still against each other, looking out at the Strip before us, this small, larger-than-life world of the night. My face dried. I felt Slava wrap her arms around my head, kissing my forehead and hair and face, and finally rest her head on my shoulder.</p><p>I didn’t feel afraid at all. I felt like I’d just woken up, alerted and a little tired and thinking about my dreams still, but at peace. Rested. Ready to go about my life in the present, dealing with the past, but in the world of the living.   </p><p>_</p><p>By the time we got back to the hotel it was late at night, but that meant nothing by Vegas Strip standards. Even in high school on the days when Slava would hang out with some guy and leave me by myself, I’d go out partying with other kids from school, and despite the fact that none of us could get into any of the clubs, I’d still get back in the middle of the night.</p><p>Slava opened the door with the hotel key, stepping aside to let me in first. “I do not know if I should carry you in,” she told me, raising her eyebrows. “Would you like that?” I shook my head modestly, smiling a little as I walked to the bed.</p><p>“I don’t know,” I sighed, lying down on my side, reclining on the voluminous bed, after I’d slipped my shoes off. “I might need to think about it…” I wasn’t sure whether to be intimidated by the fact that I was officially beginning my wedding night- something I’d never imagined would actually happen like this- or to completely give in to the liberated feeling of going down my own path, what I used to think of as unholy rage, that of the two of us Slava possessed while I merely stood by and emulated it, but now I think it was something different and both of us had it, I just didn’t know how to use it.</p><p>“Oh?” Slava got on the bed next to me, still wearing her shoes. “What is it you need to think about?” From where I was lying, I felt her legs wrap around my waist.</p><p>“Well,” I said, looking into her face and widening my eyes, “I think you should unbutton my dress because it’s hard for me to reach my back.” I turned to lay down on my stomach and looked at Slava out of the corner of my eye, like I was daring her to do it. Sometimes, if I felt like it, which on occasion I actually did, I had no problem reminding her I could be as shocking as she was. “Careful,” I told her, in an affected soft voice I knew sounded like a breathy, sensual exaggeration of my normal tone.</p><p>I felt her fingers through the fabric of my dress, then on my skin, button by button as she worked her way down to the small of my back. I gasped as I unexpectedly felt her tongue run down from the top of my spine and on down to where she’d undone the last button, then she took my ring finger and took it into her mouth for a moment. I felt something rustle for a few moments, and she got off of me and moved to lie on her side, facing me as I got off my stomach and rolled to my side. She still had her shoes on, but nothing else. I got onto my knees, carefully taking off my dress and draping it over the chair near the bed- Slava had lain hers at the foot of the bed like a decorative blanket. I looked down at the comforter as I undressed.</p><p>“Are you okay?” Slava asked me gently. I closed my eyes and then opened them, still in the same place as I had been a moment ago, and raised my head and looked down at her. Neither of us looked away from each other.  </p><p>“Yes,” I said, to her, to myself, to whatever part of the universe was listening, if it was. Something flickered in her eyes as she moved closer to me, kneeling on the bed, kissing below my navel and then upwards until she reached my throat, then my mouth.<em> Theodora, moya prekrasna narechena, everything is all right now,</em> she whispered to me, I felt her wrap her arms around me, and then she drew me in closer and I moved in, and I leaned down until she was underneath me.</p><p>_</p><p>I’d say we slept in that next morning, but for much of it, we weren’t really asleep, just resting in bed together, making the most of the last few hours left in our hotel room before we had to vacate, and then move on back to the airport. It was almost surreal, the feeling of lightness and happiness that had washed over me, pure and strong, but not the sort that I felt lost in and overpowered by- I felt liberated.</p><p>(Half asleep next to her I recalled doing the same, years ago, in our bed in Vegas. Once, on a rare occasion, we heard someone drive by. Either a motorcycle or a fast car in the middle of the night, the engine rolling and roaring. I want us to do that, I whispered to Slava, I want us to just go.)</p><p>I could have wept, then and there, remembering how lost Slava and I had both been once, how close to death, how difficult it had been for us to realize we could love each other without being the deaths of each other- that our pain wouldn’t consume us, to the point where we’d only be able to end it with injections after injections until we died. But I didn’t. Maybe at another point in time in the past or future I would, but not then. Instead I just allowed myself to lie down in bed as we talked and laughed and touched each other. In the bright light of morning blazing through the windows, we could see each other’s scars more clearly; but we’d seen those before.</p><p>“You were smiling,” Slava told me. “When you were asleep.”</p><p>“I was?” I said, turning to look at her. “I was probably having a good dream.”</p><p>She raised her eyebrows. “I’m sure you were. Now you are all pink. So pretty.” We lay down, the sunlight coming through the window, its rays on us.</p><p>“Hey. Theo,” Slava said to me, her hand taking mine, pressing it against her face. Her hand was warm, but the gem was still cool.</p><p>I suppressed a little laughter, and she didn’t bother. After a moment I calmed myself down. “Yeah?”</p><p>She took a moment to answer. “You know, sometimes we do not always do the right thing, so we have to fix it. But sometimes, I think, it is not always like that. We just do the right thing. <em>You</em> do,” she told me, moving closer to me, until I could feel her breath. I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything, but I think Slava knew what I was feeling. That we’d finally made it through, and I had begun to see myself as someone who could do what was right, what was best for myself.</p><p>She sighed dramatically. “If only we could stay here all day,” she said, “right?”</p><p>I exhaled, looking at her pointedly. “When we get back,” I said, “we’ll have so many days we can just lie in bed together.”</p><p>For the last time before we knew we’d have to really get up and leave, we drifted back into sleep together, our arms entangled beneath the vast bedding, our heads on one massive pillow, facing each other.</p><p>_</p><p>Slava had already fallen asleep by the time the airplane took off- I still couldn’t understand how she could fall asleep so easily in such odd places or positions. Her head was on my shoulder, which made me wonder if anyone was looking at us. Even a year ago I might have been nervous and woken her up, telling her maybe she didn’t want people seeing her like that, or me. But now I just thought that when you’re strapped into an airplane you can’t easily see many of your fellow passengers, and why should I be worried about being physically close to Slava in front of other people when we’d just gotten married? It would probably take some time before it was less intimidating to me- the fact that I even thought about it was significant, I knew. Would I react the same if we were on the bus from Boston back to Mashpee? Maybe it would take Slava some time, too- I knew she wasn’t as untouchable as she’d presented herself as before.</p><p>I looked out the window as the airplane began its upward soar, causing a few gasps from the passengers. But still Slava slept- I could feel her exhale against the place where my throat met my collarbone. It was a late afternoon flight, and in the early dusk of the days approaching winter, I could see the Strip had begun to light up. In the distance, I could see just darkness, the unlit expanse of desert outside the thriving, wild city that shone like jewels on a Carolingian crown in a dimly lit exhibition.</p><p>As the airplane flew higher, the place that had once been my home vanished into the night, somewhere in the desert that I would not be able to point out if I had to; and the city, the place where I’d sworn the most important vows I’d take, grew smaller too, shining like stars in reverse as they stayed on the ground and I got higher in the air.</p><p>Goodbye, I thought. Not because I thought it was a final goodbye to the city- who knew if I’d ever go back? Who was to say I never would? But because I’d gone there to make peace with my past life there. The bland, pale beige airplane window was all I looked at now as I closed it. My father was gone, and whatever I may have had or have in common with him, I was not him and I did not have to be him. And my younger self, for years, had been part lost in that desert, part lost in the museum, and part lost inside of me. Part of her remained in me, but those girls we’d been were not lost anymore, because we’d found our way.</p><p>I didn’t want to watch any of the movies or listen to any of the radio stations, and I hadn’t brought anything to read, and I didn’t have anything to grade or look over for work. I wasn’t tired either, but I leaned back, my head against Slava’s, and rested.</p><p>_</p><p>It was the middle of the night, really morning, by the time we got back to my house- the flight had gone well, but was cross-country, after all, and getting off the airplane and stepping right into yet another city of chaos was an experience, to say the least.</p><p>I’ve been asked why I don’t like Boston. “Is great city!” Slava had once said to me, “do you not like it because of your friend who died?” She meant it in a very understanding way, and I thought about it for a moment, but I still don’t think that’s why. I think Boston is a place with all the chaos of New York in a considerably smaller area. No facades, no restraint. My personal equivalent of falling down the rabbit hole into a world that has its own logic, but not a kind meant for me, at least that was the impression I got from the few visits into town when I was selling back antiques.</p><p>I do genuinely love where I live now, and that’s in the same state, and half the people in this state say they’re from Boston even when they are certainly not. It can be hard to predict where we end up, I was thinking as I opened the door- me ending up here and with Slava, Hobie in New York, my mother and her travels- and was cut off from thinking about all this, as I almost screamed as Slava picked me up and carried me across the doorway.</p><p>“What the fuck!” I called out, laughing after a moment, thinking of what she’d said in the hotel. She smiled at me, her mouth closed mostly but a few teeth sticking out.</p><p>“Now we are home, my bride,” she said triumphantly, flashing her ring at me. I still hadn’t said anything about her choice of looking for a green ring to match mine, but the thoughtfulness of it made something in me wistful, even though I knew it should have just simply made me happy. Simple happiness was something I’d seen as hard to come by for so long that I barely knew what to do with it. But I tried.</p><p>“I should go to sleep because <em>your bride</em> has work tomorrow. In a few hours, actually. Although given the season, the kids might get a snow day….” I hadn’t checked the weather at all, and I had no reasonable basis for saying it aside from the fact that Cape Cod is cold in winter, but what I really meant was that I wished we could have another day, just ours, immediately, even though I knew we’d have so many. I thought of how Slava always ate like she’d been starving, even now. Maybe that was why I clung to the time we had together- I didn’t want to feel like I had in the past, either.</p><p>“Hm!” said Slava, following me, dropping her duffel bag in the middle of the floor of the bedroom, not even bothering with it further to unpack it or put it in a more practical place. “We could have used a few of those in our day.”</p><p>I shrugged in agreement. “’In our day?’ Oh God, Slava, please don’t make us sound as old as I feel.”</p><p>She took the tie out of her hair, which had been pulled back in a loose braid, and shook it around her shoulders. When she did it she looked so free and unburdened by anything I couldn’t help but look at her every movement. “We have lived a lot,” she said, “we are not old. Just…we have seen a lot.”</p><p>I couldn’t argue with that. “Yeah,” I said, “we certainly have.” I put my hand over my mouth as I yawned. “All right, I really should go to bed.” I could feel my eyelids lowering every few moments; I was so tired all I did to get ready for bed was take off my clothes and shoes and put on a thick bathrobe.</p><p>When Slava was ready, I was already in bed. She turned off the lights. Through the window, the moon and stars shone through, and we could see shadowed versions of each other. “What are you smiling about?” Slava asked me as she got under the covers. I hadn’t realized I was. I was quiet for a moment.</p><p>“I’m … so happy we did all this,” I said, the exhaustion in my voice evident as I kept trailing off. “I was just thinking...if we had known all those years ago…”</p><p>Slava reached out and pushed a strand of hair off my face. “We knew a lot,” she told me. I thought back to a more unhappy exchange we’d had in recent weeks, when Slava had read one of my Vegas diaries, and I’d told her, despondently, <em>we didn’t know anything back then, did we.</em></p><p>I smiled at her a little, and moved closer to kiss her, which came softly due to how physically tired I was. But she reciprocated, and drew me into her arms. Some things, I thought, weren’t so difficult for me to get accustomed to at all.</p><p>_</p><p>I’d barely gotten any sleep, but somehow wasn’t tired at all anymore- I remembered that frenzied, electric feeling of living off very little sleep from my youth. As an adult, it didn’t distract me from how little rest I’d gotten.</p><p>I’d decided to keep my wedding ring on. I didn’t want to make up some lie to Slava about being worried about losing it or damaging it. I didn’t want to make up any lie to her at all. I didn’t want to have to hide my insecurities from her, because she’d see them anyway, she always did. I was never good at hiding them. I didn’t want her to think I was hiding her, that she was some scandalous, dirty secret I had to keep. That would have trapped both of us. So maybe I felt a little exposed walking around with a big ring on my finger, with anyone who looked at it being able to know what it meant- but, that didn’t mean they knew anything beyond what they saw, and if they did- realistically what was going to happen? I hadn’t talked about this with Slava, even though I knew we should have been talking about all the important things together, but this labyrinth was something I felt I needed to be able to navigate on my own, or I’d never get through.</p><p>I was in a new town and had a new life where people liked me and welcomed me and I was free to live on my own terms. No one was constantly scrutinizing me, no one hated me, I had no one who required lies from me, I had no one I feared. Now that I was free to be myself, I had to learn how to do that. If I couldn’t, then I realized, <em>that</em> would be something that my mother wouldn’t want for me, not failing to be a false version of myself in a neighborhood full of people that could barely tolerate me.</p><p>Walking into school as I opened the doors, I found, wasn’t as intimidating and nerve-wracking as when I’d gone walking through Park Avenue for the first time since the engagement party for my visit to Mrs. Barbour on her birthday. And that, as it turned out, hadn’t even gone as badly as I’d feared. When I walked through the halls of my workplace, no one stared at me or whispered. To the kids I was just another one of their teachers. They didn’t feel the need to investigate every detail of every action I made in order to justify some vendetta against me. I was just there in the same place they were, and it was fine, it was “all good,” as the kids would say. I didn’t want to generalize, but it seemed young people these days, or at least in this school, weren’t so bad as the people I’d gone to high school with. Sometimes, the trauma that lived in the back of my mind would worry on behalf of the kids I saw every day; what if some freak accident befell them- or something more sinister?  But I had faith in them. Sometimes I think that’s the best thing an adult can do for a young person. Hobie did that for me when no other adult ever did for years.</p><p>On my way down the hall to my classroom, I noticed Kara, carrying her clipboard, wearing a blue-and-white school sweatshirt and a blue velour scrunchie around her wrist. Was there a game that night? I felt like Friday had been a month ago. “So,” Kara said the moment she saw me. “How did it go?” She smiled at me. I clasped my hands together, unthinkingly, which probably was what made her notice.</p><p>“Wait…” she said looking at my hand. “Congratulations, Theo,” she told me. “That’s a very beautiful ring and you pull it off so well. Just if you take his last name, you can always go back to your own if you divorce.” She winked at me a little. I wanted to protest the way my modesty usually compelled me to when someone complimented anything about my looks, but didn’t. Kara pinned the clipboard under one arm and tilted her head so she could have an easier way of using both hands to pull back her hair in the scrunchie. I realized I should probably say something.</p><p>“Uh. Thank you,” I said, smiling far more shyly than I intended, “it, uh. It went really well.”</p><p>Kara stepped closer to me. “Okay, I know you’re really private, and that’s your prerogative, but you don’t have to worry about me gossiping about you in the teacher’s lounge or whatever. You’re not bothering me by sharing good news- unless something bad happened? Everything is fine, right?” The concern and sensitivity Kara showed to me was always something I was grateful for but made me freeze up in surprise. How could I express without spilling out my whole life story, that currently I was simultaneously fine but barely knew how to be? </p><p>I exhaled. “No. Please don’t worry. I’m fine. What happened was- it wasn’t completely spontaneous with some random guy in Vegas, it was kind of a surprise proposal although I probably should have seen it coming. And…” I exhaled, putting my hand to my mouth, my eyes looking from side to side. I must have looked like I was about to have a panic attack. I lowered my eyes a little before looking back at Kara, who was beginning to look more concerned, I assumed, about how I was acting then whatever she thought may have happened to me over the weekend. I lowered my voice. “It was my friend who I went with,” I told her. “So. That was what happened. It was her.” I realized Kara was the first person I’d told. I hadn’t even told Hobie, but then, I had thought he should hear the news in person. I wondered who the first person Slava told would be, if she’d already called Gyuri or Myriam-  if they’d known about the plan before I did?</p><p>“Theo,” Kara told me, putting a hand on my shoulder and leaning her head closer. “It’s all right. You know that, right?” I knew what she was saying. If we’d been alone, with no students nearby who could see us, I’d probably have cried right then and there. “Come on, look at me,” she said.</p><p>“I’m-“ I realized, from experience, if I apologized she’d just tell me I didn’t have to. “It’s just I’m not used to…” I reached out my hands, palms up. “You know. Telling other people about it.”</p><p>Kara nodded. “I understand completely, believe me,” she said. “It used to be kind of like that for me.” I had to process what she meant for a moment.</p><p>“Wow,” I said, “I didn’t realize-”</p><p>“Don’t worry about it,” she said. She smiled at me, with her mouth closed, her metallic pink lipstick making a wintry contrast to the white of the sweatshirt and track pants she was wearing. Kara took my hand in hers, gentle and firm. Our dark skin was almost the same shade, our two long-fingered hands could have been those of relatives. “You know, you kind of remind me of me when I was younger. And not just because of…you know,” she gave me a conspiratorial smile. I tried to return the look but I think it came out as more of a wince. Given that we were around the same age and she couldn’t have been more than a few years older than me, this wasn’t exactly encouraging for me to hear, but I knew she didn’t mean any offense. If she only knew what I was like when I was younger, I thought. “I guess that’s why I’m a little protective of you. I mean, the world can be scary and hard, but after a while I learned that doesn’t mean I don’t deserve to live my life.” Even though she didn’t know what had happened to me, her words still rung in my head.</p><p>I was biting my lips a little bit. “That’s what I’m trying to do too,” I said to her, thinking that I was so unused to making real friends that I hadn’t even realize this was what had been happening. “You know if you ever want to – hang out- or something, I don’t know what you call hanging out with friends when you’re an adult…” I cut myself off.</p><p>Kara nodded. “Of course. And feel free to bring her along! Come here,” she said, embracing me, which I accepted. I could smell sugary Victoria’s Secret body spray. I held on for a bit longer than I intended.</p><p>“You love each other?” Kara asked me, a tone like she was checking if I had locked the classroom door before leaving for the day.</p><p>I nodded, quiet for a moment. “Yeah,” I said. “Her name’s Slava. And we- we really do.” I exhaled shakily, not because I was nervous, but because the whole conversation had moved me so much I didn’t know how to respond.</p><p>She gave me a little smile. “Then next time I hear one of my girls say love isn’t real because she and her boyfriend broke up, I can reassure them and tell them I have it on good authority that it in fact does.”</p><p>“Thanks,” I said, “for. You know.”</p><p>“Anytime,” Kara said. “You look tired. I’d tell you to go to bed early tonight so tomorrow isn’t as rough but I should probably congratulate you on that, too.” I put a hand over my mouth so I could stop the surge of laughter I felt coming on, and shook my head vehemently.</p><p>“Stop,” I said laughing.</p><p>“I have to,” she said, beginning to walk away “The bell’s ringing soon. You enjoy your day, all right?” she said.</p><p>“You too,” I said, “really, please do.” I walked to my class feeling light, and when I got to the classroom I texted Slava- <em>Can’t wait to come home to you today,</em> and then added a little <em>😊 </em>so it would sound more like a pleasant message and less like a miserable SOS.</p><p><em>Nice 2 see you are happy. Look at this dog I met while walking, </em>she responded, texting me a slightly blurry picture of a little black Scottish Terrier. I put my phone in my pocket when the students began coming in for the first class of the day. It was now the beginning of December, and everyone could feel the approach of the end of the term and the start of winter break, which was even more of a significant approaching event for me because of my planned trip to Kansas. I thought to myself that this might have been my most significant year since the year I traveled the world.</p><p>“Good morning, everyone,” I said as the classroom filled, and understandably since it was so early in the morning on a Monday, I did not get a resounding reply. Class went regularly, and as I walked among the students to see their progress on their watercolors, one of my students, Alicia, a talkative, cheerful sophomore who always had something sparkly on and always shared whatever she knew about fashion history when it was relevant to the art lesson, turned to me. (In a way, with her knowledge of fashion she reminded me of myself in middle school, not only learning from my mother’s time in the industry but always making my own clothes, reproducing elaborate dresses from brands I couldn’t buy in America in those days, like Mary Magdalene and Innocent World- while I was aware it was not a popular view, I thought the styles of brands like Angelic Pretty and Baby the Stars Shine Bright were far too over the top. My clothes got me weird looks from classmates but that wasn't anything that wasn't happening anyway). I noticed her watercolor was a tropical beach with turquoise waves, aqua skies, and fluorescent hibiscuses on the dunes. Interestingly similar to my own experience, I noted- I had grown up in New York City but was still stunned by the Vegas Strip at age fourteen, something which people often were surprised by- “but you grew up in the city,” they’d say.</p><p>“Uh, hey Ms. Decker,” Alicia said to me as I was about to walk on. I stopped.</p><p>“Yeah?” I asked. “Good progress so far. Your brushstrokes are very elegant.”</p><p>“Thanks,” she said, putting down her brush for a moment, making sure the wet end of it was placed on top of the folded paper towel she had near her painting. “Anyway, your ring is so pretty. Congratulations. Is it an emerald?”</p><p>“Whoa,” said another student, Erin, a tall girl who was always wearing some kind of New England related sweatshirt who was next to Alicia, and who I saw was working on what looked like a right whale. “It’s so big,” she said, looking at my hand. “I mean congratulations.”</p><p>“It’s a tourmaline,” I said after a moment, trying to sound normal, “also thank you so much. That’s so thoughtful of you.” It really was, I thought, thinking once again that I really did care about my students. I went on to look at the other students’ work, and helped one student who had run out of blue paint. When I was done I went back to my desk. On days when the students were left to work on their own projects I would play music on the radio. Tchaikovsky’s Waltz of the Snowflakes was playing, but I could hear a few of the students talking under their voices.</p><p>“Did you see that rock,” Erin was saying, “I wonder if he’s rich.”</p><p>“I don’t know,” Alicia said, “if he was, I doubt she’d still be teaching. She’d be in Ibiza or Monte Carlo or somewhere.” It occurred to me how ironic of a statement this was.</p><p>“Maybe it’s like a family heirloom thing. Like how my great-grandmother had this sapphire pendant she passed down even though my family couldn’t afford to buy something like that now.  I wonder if we know the guy,” Erin said.</p><p>“If, you know. It even is a guy,” Alicia said matter-of-factly, with no trace of judgment. I looked down at my planner and bit my tongue.</p><p>“Oh,” Erin said after a moment. “You know, you’re probably right.” I felt my eyes widen.</p><p>I considered whether or not to tell Slava when I went home. When I thought about it, my students’ idle talk didn’t frighten or offend me, it just surprised me and took me off guard.</p><p>I knew I’d been secretive for the months I’d lived here, but part of that was because I felt like the less people knew about me, the more I could just live as myself. I wasn’t the Attack Girl here and I loved that. I’d spent so many years as the Attack Girl. It not only meant that everyone saw me as a current tragedy that would only get worse, and any interaction anyone could have with me was charity because of how wretched I was, but that everyone had a handy justification for doing so. No one ever had to think about if they were hurting me- the damage was already done. My life was public knowledge, so people could say anything they liked about me. I was a tabloid figure. And after all I’d been through, I must be so traumatized that I couldn’t possibly ever be like other people, which meant it was an unspoken agreement that I’d never had any say in the fact that I was never to belong. It didn’t matter that much of this would have likely happened to me if I’d never been in the museum, and that some of it had been happening long before then. People had already been in the habit of making up their minds about me. The fact that at thirteen everyone knew the worst thing that had ever happened to me, just meant that they felt justified in assuming they knew everything about me. What else was there to know besides what they saw and heard?</p><p>Sometimes I wondered if I was hiding, by not saying much about my personal life to anyone. But if I was, I wasn’t hiding nearly as much as I had in New York. I didn’t feel the same kind of pure, overpowering bad I constantly felt then, even if it was still hard, even though I knew I’d never be completely “over it”- I didn’t think that would ever be possible.</p><p>I listened to the music on the radio, light and hopeful, sounding exactly how a snowfall would sound if it was music. It was now December, the end of the year. Some people see January as a time of renewal, of making resolutions, or they look at the Spring as a time of rebirth and hope. As for me, these past few years December has been a time of beginnings for me. The year is ending- and like a good painting, sometimes you have to get rid of all the things you don’t need and add what you do in order to end it well.</p><p>_</p><p>When I got home, Slava was animatedly speaking in what I gathered was Ukrainian on her cell phone while pacing around. Everything seemed to be all right- I could make out the name Gyuri and assumed that was who she was talking to. She waved to me when she saw me, and I set out to make some tea. After a few minutes she was off the phone.</p><p>“You know what Gyuri told me? He said he <em>knew</em> you would say yes,” she said, a victorious look on her face.</p><p>“Wow,” I said, “you know, I think it came as more of a surprise to me than you anticipated, not that I’m complaining. In fact some of the students seemed to be a little interested in recent developments in my life.” I didn’t tell her about my conversation with Kara, not yet. I knew it would lead to a deeper, more serious conversation I didn’t want to make myself unhappy with yet, even though I knew one way or another something of the sort was inevitable.</p><p>“In what way?” Slava asked, clearly enjoying it. “They think you have very sexy and beautiful mistress?”  </p><p>I crossed my arms. “Actually, since we’re married, I don’t think you get to be a mistress anymore. Sorry,” I said, shrugging and giving her a sly look. “Anyway. They liked my ring, is all. A friend of mine who’s one of the coaches congratulated me. I didn’t tell anyone much though. I think I’m going to take my time with talking about my personal life here. You know?” I asked, looking at her.</p><p>“I understand,” she said solemnly, “you don’t want certain things to define you. But, I think, if you want, is fine to not keep everything a secret. Sometimes when you do that it does not feel so right,” I assumed she meant when she took a false name in Miami, and tried to start a new life for herself after running from Vegas.</p><p>“You don’t have to worry about that,” I said after a long, quiet moment. I didn’t want to react angrily to her. She didn’t mean anything by it. I knew she didn’t really think the situations were the exact same, that I was lying about who I was or living under a false identity that couldn’t be sustained. “I just…need a while.” I sighed. Slava got up because the tea kettle was whistling. She brought back two cups and set them on the table. When she put her hands on my face they were warm from the heated water. I vaguely remembered us warming up each other’s hands and faces that way in my father’s too-cold, over-air conditioned house. “I’m going to be okay,” I said, my voice shaking a little, closing my eyes for a moment.</p><p>“I know you are,” she told me, enunciating gently every word. “So. Let me ask you this, Princess. Am I a good housewife? Because this is very new to me too.” I smiled a little.</p><p>“Yes,” I said, “I think you might just be the best one, even though I don’t have many to choose from. That won’t be a problem, though.” The fact that I was able to talk with her like this, I thought, maybe that meant I was starting to feel better about myself in some ways. I hadn’t genuinely felt that I hated myself in a while. But sometimes I just felt afraid of the idea of other people getting to know me.  </p><p>I noticed that on the table was one of my old notebooks- she’d gone back to reading them quickly. I wonder how long it would take her- it seemed like I’d written volumes upon volumes, without even realizing it. “When is that from?” I asked.</p><p>“We were in high school,” she said. “Not too long after we met.” She seemed to have something to say, nodding to herself. “Do you remember how you would always be so afraid when I tried to hitchhike? But I would still do it anyway?” I nodded, wondering if she was about to recount one of our misadventures, and we’d laugh about it despite how dangerously we’d lived at the time. She looked down for a moment, then back up, like she was hesitating to tell me something. “Do you remember when I asked you if you were a virgin?” I bit my lip.</p><p>Before I could respond, she continued. Her lips were downturned, and her eyes had a sort of desperate look in them. “You wrote that I told you I was not. That I said something about Alaska that I would tell you about later.” She smiled grimly, and it did not reach her eyes. “I suppose, now it is later.” I could feel my eyes widening. I put my hand on hers, knowing what kind of thing she hadn’t told me all those years ago, and was about to tell me. We’d both recently come close enough to discussing in detail our past scars that came from times we weren’t there to witness each other’s pain. Even then, she’d tried to tell me some things. She shrugged, “I think it was too hard for me to speak of it then. I was afraid to even think of it. And I thought it would hurt you, to tell you.”</p><p>“It was like that for me,” I said, so quiet I didn’t even know how I’d managed to speak so softly. “When…things happened to me like that. I’m sure you’ve already read about some of it.” I felt like crying, my throat was tight and my eyes were overflowing, but I tried to control myself as best I could. We had to talk about these things, I supposed, if we were ever going to be able to get to a point where it didn’t hurt too much to speak of it.</p><p>She closed her eyes, nodding. I heard her swallow. “I know,” she said, “that is why I wanted to tell you. And how we almost talked of it when I came here. When you said you were glad you had me then…” Her voice sounded pained, like it hurt to speak but she needed to do it anyway. At that moment, her head rose slowly and she opened her eyes. “I was thirteen,” she said. “My father was gone for a few weeks. Sometimes I would hitchhike into the town. Sometimes afterwards in Texas and such I would still hitchhike. A lot of nice people, really. Most times I was very fortunate. One day in the town square, this guy picks me up and says he can take me home. He knows me, knows who I am. Everyone does in town, I learn.” Another thing we shared, I thought- everyone knew our names, and thus, decided they knew everything else. “When he is driving he says he will take me to his house to eat because he knows my father is not home and he sees me lifting Slim Jims from corner store for my dinner.” She smiles sadly. “I remember little details. The way the quilt on his bed scratched at my skin. How he breathed on my face so heavily. Yellow shade of paint on his walls in every room.” She shook her head, her jaw clenched visibly. “When he was asleep I left by climbing out the window. I ran and ran until I could not and then I walked and then I went home. And I thought, then, my life was to be alone, except for my father. I thought it was just the two of us, and no one else could ever know how alone we were.” She wiped one of her eyes with the back of her hand. “So that was what I did not tell you all those years ago,” she said, “I was not ready.” She noticed my hand still on hers, and took her other hand and held onto my wrist. “I wish neither of us had been that alone.”</p><p>I sniffed, wiping my nose. “I- I wish the same,” I said, my voice shaking. “You didn’t need to protect me from the truth. I understand why you didn’t tell me, but you could have. You were my closest friend. And you still are. That’s why…” I gestured towards the notebooks. “I told you about…the guys at school who assaulted me. I couldn’t move because I was so afraid and I didn’t tell my mother because I wished it had never happened and I didn’t want to upset her. You were there at the party when that guy tried to…” I shook my head. “My boyfriend who was an adult when I was fifteen. He’d get me drunk and I’d tell Hobie I was at the library. Sometimes I was so afraid I’d start shaking. He would act like he didn’t notice. He’d say I was so mature. That the fact that I had no friends my age made me more like an adult. Even then I knew it wasn’t true.” I exhaled, long and miserable. Thinking about those things I’d gone through exhausted me. I’d barely ever talked about them to anyone. I’d spent years going between telling myself I was dirty and it was my fault, and that it was no big deal and I was weak and pathetic and not normal for making such a big deal of it. I could see Slava slowly shaking her head to herself, her eyes downcast. “But we’re not alone anymore,” I tried to sound hopeful.</p><p>“No,” she said, taking a hand and raking it through her hair.  “If I have any say in it we are never going to be alone again.” Her finger traced over my ring, and I could feel the cool metal of her ring on my skin.</p><p>“Of course not,” I said so vehemently, so impassioned, my self from a few years ago would have been completely shocked. I took a deep breath in and out. “In Amsterdam I remember you said something about our lived being intertwined by all of…what happened. But…we always were from the day we met, I think.”</p><p>She was smiling at me, vaguely, like she was lost in some thought. “I am so grateful for you, Theodora,” she told me.</p><p>I nodded my head, almost too overcome to speak for a moment. “I love you, Slava,” I told her. She leaned her head down and kissed my hand, setting her head on the table next to me as we sat there hand in hand.</p><p>_</p><p>Later, we were on the couch half-watching the local news. Snow reports and sea temperatures, a speech from the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribal Chairman, a truck crash on the highway.</p><p>“You know,” she said to me seriously, as we shared a heated blanket, “I will be thinking of you every day when you go to Kansas. I hope it is- I hope it will be what you need.” The day was coming up sooner than I realized.</p><p>“Well, I’m so delicate and fragile. I’m worried I’ll faint and you won’t be there to catch me,” I said sardonically, tilting my head back and putting a hand to my forehead, which made her laugh abruptly. But them we were both quiet again. “I…I hope so too,” I said, and she wrapped her arms around my waist and put her head on my shoulder.</p><p>“You are a good daughter,” Slava told me. A few years ago I wouldn’t have agreed. Now, I knew I had just been having a hard time, and I think my mother would have understood. I didn’t anymore see myself as having been a disappointment to her- I’d just been lost, and I think she would have been more sad than anything else, to have seen what my life had been. Had been, but not now.  </p><p>I wished my mother could have known me as an adult. Slava, too, I wish she’d been able to know. I wished she could have been alive and she could have come with me back to her hometown. I wished she was alive and I didn’t have to bury her- but I didn’t know of anyone else who could do it, and I was finally able to lay her to rest, and I thought I was finally able to go and search for parts of her from her past she’d never gotten to tell me about, parts of me that we’d never been able to pass down.</p><p>“Oh,” Slava told me again, “don’t cry. I don’t mean to upset you.”</p><p>I caught my breath. “No. You didn’t. It’s okay,” I said, telling the truth but still crying. “It’s just…sometimes I don’t know what else to do,” I tried to explain. “With all I feel sometimes.”</p><p>I felt one of Slava’s fingers brush my face. “Yeah,” she said, taking a deep, long breath, “I know what you mean.”   </p><p>“Hey,” I said then, my vision having gone towards the window. I rubbed at my eyes and took some deep breaths. “It’s snowing.” It had snowed the first night she’d come here, a few weeks back. I wondered if she remembered- she probably did, and the thought of it filled me with warmth. The snowflakes were falling, thick and fast, like flurries of confetti at a party thrown in the air, coming down to the ground.</p><p>She turned her head to look at it, and smiled a little. When I saw her, I wondered if she was thinking about her childhood in Eastern Europe and the cold, hard winters she’d made peace with; or Alaska, and what she’d suffered there, and other places she’d left behind. Or, I wondered, if she was looking out that window just thinking about the moment she was living in, how things in her life were right there and right then, at home looking at something beautiful and peaceful, the way I realized I was doing.</p><p> </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Kansas</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Part III: Kansas</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>“Do you know how to make a peaceful road</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Through human memory?”</em>
</p><p><em> -</em>“Exile of Memory,” Joy Harjo</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>
  <em>“Sing I the songs of the world,</em>
</p><p>
  <em>    The passionate songs of the world.”</em>
</p><p>-“Songs of the Spavinaw,” Ruth Muskrat Bronson</p><p> </p><p>The next few weeks of the school term passed quickly. On the last week before break, I had one of my more technologically inclined coworkers help me set up the projector so I could show a movie, like many other classes were doing.  I decided on <em>It’s A Wonderful Life,</em> due to its Christmas theme, and to my surprise many of the students hadn’t seen it. Then again, I’m sure most young people these days don’t almost exclusively watch Old Hollywood movies the way I did, even the classics.</p><p>I told the students I’d just be one minute, then walked out of the room quickly, not even putting on my jacket until I walked down the stairs and got outside. Trying to breathe evenly, I took my phone out of my pocket and walked to where I knew the reception would be best. It was about thirty degrees, it seemed, and since the school had been heated, the first touches of winter air on me were invigorating rather than numbing ice, but I knew I shouldn’t stay out too long unless I wanted to get a cold. I dialed Hobie’s number before my fingers could become numbed by the cold. It was the middle of the day, and business had been better than it had been before, but he still didn’t keep the shop open too late and sometimes closed in the mid-afternoon.</p><p>After a few rings, he picked up the phone. “Theo,” he began almost tentatively. I could tell he hadn’t quite expected me and was surprised to have seen my number on his caller ID. “Is everything all right?” he asked, a degree of concern in his voice.</p><p>I swallowed, inhaling cold air that rushed up my nostrils forcefully. “Yes. Yes, it is,” I said. “I just…I’m at work right now so I have to be quick, I know you’re working too.”</p><p>“I understand,” Hobie said to me. I didn’t hear anyone in the background, which reflexively made me worry even though I knew business hadn’t been failing the way it once was. “What did you need to tell me?” Even the tone of his voice made me feel like I could confide in him. As a child that quality had intimidated me so much because I felt I wasn’t deserving, so I ended up confiding nothing.</p><p>“Okay,” I began, “so this week I’m going to Kansas. Like I told you.”</p><p>“I didn’t realize it was so soon,” Hobie said. “This year is going by so fast.” It really was. But then, the end of the year always goes fast.</p><p>“I know I need to go there alone,” I said solemnly. “But…” I felt my shoulders shiver a little involuntarily. “I want to visit you for the holiday. Actually, Slava and I want to.” I hadn’t asked her, but we’d talked about going back to New York, I assumed she wouldn’t be against going for the holiday. “And then…I don’t know what’s going to happen. But maybe I can talk with you about it when I see you again,” I said, almost a question. I sounded so unsure of myself, not like I was asking for Hobie’s permission so much as his confirmation and reassurance that I was capable of doing any of these things. I looked down, seeing pale frost on the dark grass beneath my feet. I was twisting a coil of hair around one of my fingers so tightly it felt like it was burning my skin.</p><p>“Of course, Theo,” Hobie told me, “of course. You and Slava will be more than welcome to stay however long you like.” I felt immediately guilty that I hadn’t visited and didn’t call as much as I knew I should. “And…as for your trip…I know it’s difficult. But sometimes when we lose people, remembering them helps us to see that parts of their lives still remain with us in the world.” My chest hurt thinking about how many years we’d been in so much pain we didn’t confide in each other over our grief even though we so easily could have. But, maybe he was right, it was difficult. I didn’t blame him for whatever his pain prevented him from being able to do. And we still had one another. It wasn’t too late.</p><p>“I,” I tried to begin, “Thank you. I look forward to seeing you and I hope you’re taking care of yourself. Popchyk, too. Slava and I have a lot to tell you,” I added guiltily. I felt I should have at least said something like that. “I’ll have a lot to tell you…” Part of me just wanted to run back to the school and open the door and when I got on the other side, see myself in the airport in Kansas, already having arrived. Not because I wanted to get it all over with but because I felt I needed to do it, and the more time passed, I worried I was losing time and would forget something important, though I did not know what.</p><p>“I’m sure the two of you are taking care of each other,” he said warmly. “And yourselves.”</p><p>“Yeah,” I said, my voice soft, calmed by this conversation. “I should let you get back to work.” I wondered how much time had passed and if it would be a bad idea to run back through the doors.</p><p>“All right,” Hobie said. “I’ll talk to you soon,” he said.</p><p>“Yes,” I said, holding my phone with both hands, alone in front of the school. “I’ll talk to you too,” I said. My ear against the receiver, I imagined my head against his chest, his arms around me. Maybe I hadn’t always been a flawless daughter, but it wasn’t too late for me to try to be as good as I could.</p><p>I listened to the dial tone for a moment before deciding to speed-walk back into class, which left me catching my breath by the time I got back to my students. But the film was still on and it was still the middle of class and when I pushed the door open, heaving breaths, only a few of the kids turned their heads. All I’d done was leave for a few moments for a call. There was no need to scrutinize every move I made, something I realized every time people didn’t do it. I smiled at the sight of my students- some of them watching the film, some of them whispering to each other, some of them on their phones, some of them doing all three. On the projector screen, the moon was shining in black and white. I closed my eyes and imagined how the moon would look in Kansas, if seeing the same things from where my mother had stood would mean I’d see them the same way, or my own way, or some of both.</p><p>_</p><p>When I was young my mother took out one of her large art books that always captivated me, and opened it up to the page with Fabritius’ finch on it. “When I was a few years older than you are now,” she told me, sitting next to me, with half the book on my lap and the other half on hers as we read on my bed, “I went to the library and saw a picture of this painting for the first time.”</p><p>“The Goldfinch,” I said, finding the title. Looking at it then, I’m not sure if that was the first time I thought the bird reminded me of her, with its black feathers on its head like hair, its dark eyes, its alertness and graceful stance. But on some level, as she opened the book, I had begun to associate the painting with her. My mother’s maiden name was Youngbird. Her real name, to be accurate. She’d never officially taken my father’s name although people ascribed it to her anyway. I’d later seen yet another connection between my mother and the finch, right in her name, and I was sure she’d thought of that, too, possibly right from the first day she saw the image.</p><p>Sometimes in later years I felt that having my father’s last name was some kind of burden I needed to shoulder, because I thought I was too much like him. But when I was younger, I just wished I had my mother’s name, and not the name of my father who clearly didn’t love us or want us and caused so many problems for us, who I was afraid of and who had made my mom so unhappy, a name I thought was ugly and prompted kids at school to give me even more stupid, suggestive nicknames. My mother’s name was what I wanted- to have her name, to have the law and all the world officially consider me her daughter first and foremost.</p><p>When I was engaged, I looked back on all this, thinking I’d been an ignorant child. I’d thought, I had forgotten that if I one day got married, I would get a new name but it would never be my mother’s, my “maiden name” would always be my father’s, and there was no third place for last names. If I had to be my father’s daughter, I didn’t want to be myself, and I clung to that thought every time I thought of what it would mean to take the name Barbour.</p><p>“Yes, Theo,” she said gently. I smiled to myself. My feet didn’t touch the ground, and my mother’s feet in her light blue socks that felt like cashmere but weren’t rested on the Cinnamoroll rug near my bed.</p><p>“This was my favorite painting when I was young. It still is,” she told me. “One day I’d love to see it in person. It would just be wonderful if it was in an exhibition in the United States…but I suppose for now we’ll have to wait until we can travel the world,” she looked at me playfully then and I giggled a little, my hands over my mouth. We certainly didn’t have the means to travel the world, but she always talked about wanting me to go places, like it was something we could do together. The way her parents did for her. Sometimes I thought it was unfair- even if we didn’t have a lot of money to go all around the world, we could still drive around the country and travel and see things ourselves our way. That was what she and her parents had done. I imagined myself telling her, I’ll learn more with you than in school. But I never did say it. I never could bring myself to ask it of her.</p><p>“Wow. He looks so alive,” I said, observing the brushstrokes, the light in the bird’s eyes. There was something so sad and romantic about the finch, like the swan-maidens in Swan Lake, like I could understand him, I could know what he was and where he’d been by looking into his eyes.  </p><p>“He does, doesn’t he?” my mother said. The bird was staying still. He didn’t move because he knew he couldn’t. So he just stood where he was, bracing himself. He was so brave, I thought, to not back down when he had nowhere to go.</p><p>Sometimes I felt guilty that my mother stayed with my father for as long as she did. I knew she would have packed up and left quietly in the middle of the night sometime if not for me. Sometimes, even after he left and things were better, I still dreamed she’d do that, just leave and let me come along, anywhere.</p><p>“Thank you, Mom.” I looked up to my mother. “It’s so nice,” I said looking back at it. Spontaneously, I wrapped my arms around her waist.</p><p>“Are you all right, puppy?” she asked, putting her hand to my forehead, stroking back my hair.</p><p>“Mhm,” I said quietly, “I just feel happy right now.” </p><p>She tapped my nose with her finger and I laughed a little. “Well, then I’m happy too,” she told me. I never wanted to let go. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been that happy, if I’d ever been.</p><p>_</p><p>It was going to be my last day of work before break, but I was leaving early. A substitute was to take my place for the rest of the school week.</p><p>Before I went to work, I kept finding myself going back into my bedroom, to look at the urn of my mother’s remaining ashes. Some of them would forever lie in Central Park, but I’d kept the rest. All those years ago, I couldn’t stand the idea of burying all of her; I thought it would be getting rid of her. It was probably one of the few good decisions I made in my childhood. Then, I didn’t have the means and independence to bury her with her family instead of some unmarked space. But now, I did.</p><p>Holding my purse in one hand and dragging my fingers through my hair with the other, I looked up at the pristine urn on my shelf. There was nothing surrounding it other than a photograph of her when she was young, maybe younger than I am now- I’d found it while unpacking my journals, and the image had fallen out of one of the earlier notebooks. Part of me wanted to take the urn from the shelf and hold it close to me just for a moment. But I needed to leave. I lowered my head, quickly walking out of my bedroom, the heels of my shoes sinking into the thick rug. The house was cold and I could imagine the metal of the urn emanating its coldness even through my clothes.</p><p>(Isabella and the Pot of Basil, a painting I’d heard about as it was right in Boston, came to my mind. Isabella closes eyes, her otherworldly face passionate with grief as she leans into the shadows, her hand wilting against the basil-pot, watered with her tears, with Lorenzo’s head buried inside.)</p><p>Slava had decided to sleep in that day. At the moment she seemed to be half awake and half asleep, barely registering that I had been going in and out of the bedroom, maybe even thinking it was possibly a dream and paying no mind. Already in these weeks she’d made her mark in the house.  A denim jacket of hers hung on a bedpost; I could see a black smudge of her eyeliner on the pale blue pillowcase; there was at least one pair of shoes at any given time thrown haphazardly on the floor in every room, not to mention I’d sometimes see this new necklace she’d gotten customized somewhere, a thick silver chain with the word СЛАВА for a pendant- “My name, it means glory,” she’d told me as if it had been her idea, but then, given that it had been her idea to go by the shortened version of her name, you could say that she could take some credit. It was starting to feel like a home we shared. I saw that on the floor next to her side of the bed, one of my notebooks was there, bookmarked with what appeared to be her phone.</p><p>“Um,” I said quietly, “I’m going now. I’ll see you later today,”</p><p>“Hm,” she said, half-asleep, half her face pressed into the pillow, “have a good day.” I wondered if she dreamed, and what she dreamed about, and if she remembered them. Sometimes, I no longer remembered mine; I would lose memory the moment I woke up, with a sense that I had dreamed something terrible or strange, but unable to recall the specifics. But lately, I rarely dreamed of that day in the museum. I took one last look at her, and the urn, and walked out of the room.</p><p>_</p><p>Driving to school, it had begun to rain, cold dashes of water tapping against my windshield so hard the sound was almost painful in its harshness. The sound of the windshield wipers, swishing and mechanical, competed with the sound of the radio’s soft music- <em>she was born to the woman we could blame, make me a beast half as brave, I’d be the same…</em>At a stop light I looked to my side, at the wall of trees, now mostly without their leaves, at the side of the highway. In the summer it was almost pure green. Now I looked through the remaining pieces of forest, and, strangely, wondered if I walked in, would I find anyone. <em>She was certainly the spark for all I’d done, the window was wide, she could see the dogs running</em>…. Came the music as the barrage of water hit my windows.</p><p>I tried to remember if I’d gone down this road when my mother and I had traveled to Wellfleet years ago. This was still the highway. Possibly I had. Sometimes, I thought, the most painful part of remembering wasn’t having to live with the past but having to think about, in contrast, everything that had been forgotten and wondering what important things you’d forgotten so deeply you didn’t even think about whether or not you could remember them.  </p><p>By the time I turned down the road and made my way to the complex of the school, it was still relatively early. I wasn’t sure if my habit of always coming to work early was some kind of overcompensation of my history as a student or what I’d done while working for Hobie, or if it was some kind of anxious way of trying to get the start of the day out of the way, or if I just didn’t want to deal with the stress of being late and dealing with morning rush hour traffic, but whatever it was, I always seemed to be one of the first people there. I was speed-walking my way to the door, already half-soaked with rain, when I saw another car nearby, its window fogged with what I quickly saw was smoke. It wasn’t a student, and when I looked closer, I realized it was Daniel. After a second he turned his head and clearly made eye contact with me. I froze for a moment, then realized I didn’t want to seem like some kind of stalker, and quickly turned around and made my way into the building.</p><p>Thankfully, due to the fact that I’d been wearing a coat, I wasn’t too drenched. Being in a high school covered in water gave me bizarre flashbacks to my high school days when Slava and I had attended a party in the dead heat of June and cooled off by lying down in the sprinklers’ path, which had briefly given me the nickname of “Adirondacks,” I suppose because I was from New York, I guess they at least put in effort for that one. After wringing out my hair into the ladies’ room sink, I made my way to my classroom. I wasn’t quite sure why, but I walked up to one of the closed windows, and stood so close to it that I could feel the cool of the outside emanating from the glass. I closed my eyes and listened to the rain, taking deep breaths. Soon I would be far away, again. I could be hearing this exact sound in Kansas. I imagined opening my eyes and finding myself there. When I’d stayed at the motel in Las Vegas with Slava over a long weekend when we were in high school, it had fallen on the occasion of a rare desert rain. And we had lain down on the cement outside to take it in, even though it was in the cold of February. I had looked up at the sky and let it rain on me as I watched the moon. I could feel my forehead against the glass as I leaned forward. The impact of the rain against the glass, so close to my skin.</p><p>“Hey, I hope I didn’t startle you out there…” trailed off a voice tentatively, which I recognized as Daniel.</p><p>“Fuck!” I gasped reflexively, moving back and opening my eyes. I hadn’t expected anyone to come in at all. “Oh. Hey, Daniel,” I said, composing myself.</p><p>“Sorry again, Theo,” he said, putting a hand to the back of his head apologetically, “I didn’t mean to sneak up on you.”</p><p>“No, it’s all right,” I said, clearing my throat, “it’s just that I’m always early and I never really expect people to come in as early as I do.” </p><p>He smiled crookedly, as though trying to make a joke, though his face looked cast in unhappiness. I could recognize it. “I hope you won’t bust me for smoking cigarettes on school property,” he said, self-deprecating, like I was in on some kind of joke. </p><p>I shook my head. “Are you all right?” I found myself asking. He clearly wasn’t and I didn’t exactly know what else to say now that he was right here.</p><p>He was quiet for a moment, looking down at the floor then looking back up. “Well…I got some very bad news, is what happened,” he said, his voice sounding worn out from trying to find a way to phrase it.</p><p>“I’m sorry,” I said, truly meaning it, but not knowing what to do. I wasn’t that used to being on the other side of this, though I’d heard a good deal of others’ bad news. It felt strange and I wondered why Daniel had chosen me- because I was right there and no one else was here? Because I had seen him in his private grief and that had, in his mind, made me the right choice, the only choice, because I had been the one to see? Because he could tell something was off with me? Because I was new here and he assumed I wouldn’t be here for much longer so I was safe to talk to? I really doubted he was still entertaining the idea of asking me out, especially since I was fairly certain people vaguely knew I had gotten married recently.</p><p>We were still distanced from each other, me at the window and him at the doorway. I didn’t ask what had happened, but I had barely said I was sorry before he continued on. As though he couldn’t stop. “Do you read the newspaper?” he asked me. The local one or the Globe, I wondered, but didn’t ask. I just shook my head- I hadn’t gotten around to subscribing to anything yet despite how long I’d been here, and instead caught the news on television. “Well,” he said, exhaling, “that was how I found out. Through the obituary section. My friend Sean. I hadn’t spoken to him or seen him in a while. We’d been through a lot together, but you know. Sometimes you don’t see people as much as you used to.” I knew exactly what he meant. “He’d been using for years, even when I still saw him all the time. And- I learned this morning he OD’d on fentanyl. It happened the other day.” He shook his head, exhaling heavily. “I just feel like, if things had gone differently, it could have been me, but it wasn’t. And I wish I’d been able to do more for him and that we hadn’t drifted apart.” He looked in my eyes, stopping. “I’m sorry. That probably didn’t make any sense to you-”</p><p>“No,” I insisted, shaking my head. I realized I was clasping my hands tightly together to keep them from wringing, a habit I’d picked up somewhere along the way of trying to make things in my life better. In some ways I supposed I’d started with appearances. I looked him in the eye and wondered what he saw. “It does. I know…exactly how it is,” I said, not wanting to say too much, but also this time, not wanting to say too little. We were both quiet for a moment.</p><p>“I’ve seen too many people struggle with this, die like this,” he said to me. I could have been Sean, too, he could have been me, I thought. I nodded, my face towards the ground. I put my hands to my face for a moment, rubbing upwards, pushing my hair back like I was washing my face.</p><p>(Sometimes when I thought about how I’d seen my mother, I knew I’d never tell any doctor or therapist, because they would think it was some kind of dream or hallucination. But I will always think it was her that saved me. Even if it was only her memory, it was still her. And without her I do not think I would have survived, even if I had survived that day.)</p><p>“I’ve been there,” I said simply. Me and too many people I’d known. I wondered if he guessed that what I said was literal, that I had been dying that way for years, coming so close to the edge so many times, and then I’d finally tried to intentionally end it. Neither of us moved closer to one another, but I think we were sharing some kind of understanding then, of feeling the same thing and having been in the same place, regardless of exactly how we’d gotten there. I wondered how far I really was from where I had been then, how far Daniel was from where his friends had been. If there would ever be a point where if I looked over my shoulder it wouldn’t even be a spot far away on the horizon. Maybe some things don’t ever leave you entirely once they happen. You just have to live with them, in peace with those parts of the past knowing at one point they may have never become part of the past at all.</p><p>“I’m sorry,” he told me. There I was, back on my usual side. I suppose there’s never an easy way respond to things like this.</p><p>“Don’t be,” I said, half-smiling, or something close to it. I meant it. I didn’t want him to be sorry for me. “I hope you’re all right.”</p><p>“Thank you,” he said. I thought that meant, he didn’t feel all right, but he would be. Thank you for the sentiment. Thank you for understanding, for knowing. He looked at me for a moment. “Congratulations,” he said, a corner of his mouth turning up a little. I guessed he’d noticed the ring.</p><p>“Thank you,” I said. “Really.” I sighed. “If you ever want to talk…”</p><p>He nodded his head. “You too,” he said, “if you ever want to.” He seemed to narrow his eyes, and I realized he’d seen the clock when he spoke next. “I should get going. I have to teach first period. But thank you,” he said, his voice slow, but grateful.</p><p>I smiled at him and watched him leave. Then I went to my desk and prepared for classes to begin. My hair was almost dry, and though the room was heated, the rainwater in my hair had soaked through the back of my shirt through my skin, feeling colder on me than it was outside. I would have to wait for it to go away. I thought of opening the window and sticking my head out and letting it rain on me, but I didn’t. I closed my eyes and thought of once, this summer, how it had rained all night, and it was one of the nights I couldn’t sleep and went to the beach and watched the moon. I’d lain in the sand, wet with rainwater and saltwater, and looked up and let myself relax.</p><p> _</p><p>I hadn’t written in any journal for a long time, but I used a school notebook that day, to write this.</p><p>
  <em>Things I wish I could tell my mother:</em>
</p><p>
  <em>When I went to the beach at night all those times to look at the moon, I’d been thinking of what you were saying. I was at a point where I was trying to figure things out, where I was going and what I was doing. And doing that wasn’t hurting me even if it maybe wasn’t always helping, it was done because I felt at peace doing that, looking up at the moon like you reminded me. I don’t think it was unhealthy, even though I stopped. I didn’t stop because I forgot you or what you said. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>I’m sad sometimes, but not sad every hour of every day anymore. I don’t want to die anymore, and I never want to be in a place where I’m sad enough to use again. I wish I had a way of assuring you of that. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>It makes me happy in ways I don’t know how to express that the indigenous kids in this area have a language program right in this town. I wish I could tell you about it, how sometimes I can hear my students speak Wôpanâak. I want you to know that if you had lived I would have loved to have learned Tsalagi with you the way you wanted us to do. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>I got married, for real this time. To a woman. The greatest friend I’ve ever had. And we love each other, we really do, I never believed I would have something like that. She takes a lot of getting used to, but I think, you would love her all the same. I suppose I take a lot of getting used to, also. You probably knew about me and were letting me take my time. I want to thank you.   </em>
</p><p>
  <em>I still don’t love the world or see it as a good place. I don’t know if I ever can. I want to apologize to you for that, for some reason, but I think maybe you’d understand. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>Soon, very soon, I am going to your hometown. I will be burying your remains with your family. I will be going there for the first time in my life, even though I still remember everything you told me. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>I’m sorry I took so long with all of it, but I’m doing it. For both of us.  </em>
</p><p>_</p><p>The rain had stopped halfway through the day, but the sky remained gray, and the sun hidden, vaguely shining a pale circle of light. A sort of peaceful, freshwater pearl gray, with no storm clouds, nothing but washed-out expanses, like vast watercolor strokes at the top of a landscape. When I went outside I wrapped my scarf around me and kept my eyes on the ground so as not to slip over any of the ice that had formed from the rain. My windows were dusted with frost, small lacelike patterns.</p><p>“Hey. Ms. D,” I heard a young voice, and turned around, seeing Tanya in a pink parka with a few friends, Victor among them, looking up from his cell phone. “You’re lucky, you get extra vacation. Have fun,” she said.</p><p>“Well,” I said, “I hope you all do too. Happy Holidays,” I told them. Realizing that I could say that without people never letting it go was another reason why I realized I was far better off out of Park Avenue than I ever would have been in it. But also, I liked it here even without the negative comparisons, I had found. Sometimes being on vacation with your friends at that age is like having a small world all to yourself. It’s something I’m glad I never took for granted.</p><p>People didn’t seem to think I was a dangerous influence and unwanted presence here, if anything, the opposite; the parent-teacher conferences back during midterms had gone relatively well and even if I’d been clearly nervous, they seemed to understand. Sometimes I wondered if I came across as one of those sad teachers with miserable personal lives who experience no happiness outside of helping their students. But lately, I wondered, if people saw me as having clearly lived and interesting and eventful, if not perfect, life, if I was someone people wanted to know without pressuring me for information. Maybe that was it. I’d always been so preoccupied with how other people saw me that I had trouble conceiving of the idea that people wouldn’t see me in entirely negative terms.</p><p>I’d miss my students for the winter break, I realized. I didn’t feel like I had to worry urgently for them in the way that I now realize Mrs. Spears knew Slava and I were in danger and didn’t know what to do with that knowledge. Maybe some of my students did have serious issues I didn’t know about- I wouldn’t be surprised. Young people can do a better job at hiding that from adults than they are often given credit for, and the world has a way of giving young people problems they don’t have the resources to solve and fix. But I had faith in them. I trusted them. And I would never claim myself as any kind of role model, but I hoped they trusted me if they ever needed me for anything, even if I sometimes thought I’d never be able to help anyone, I’d at least be able to listen.</p><p>_</p><p>If I had been a color, sometimes I felt I’d be a washed-out, ghostly gray, while other times I thought I’d be a soft, delicate pink. When I walked through the door and got home, I supposed I was feeling like both of those at once. I often did when I’d been particularly introspective about some of the harder things to think about, but came out of it feeling better.</p><p>“Slava?” I called softly, taking off my white leather boots. (Slava had told me, approvingly, they were like go-go dancer shoes. I’d bought them from the shopping center down the highway thinking they were a good shade to wear for the winter, but her compliment made me feel confident. A while ago, it probably would have made me self-conscious.)   </p><p>“Am in the bedroom,” I heard her call, her voice always coming out louder than necessary. When I got in, she was on the bed, dressed and looking at her phone, seemingly aimlessly. She looked up and put the phone down when she saw me. “I just got back here from the Country Store,” she told me. “Used the ATM, got some things to eat. Just a few minutes ago,” she gestured with her arm, “I was out there.” She smiled. “And how was today? Come here. Come, you know you’ve been waiting to,” she said, laughing as I got closer and she drew me in with her arms to pull me next to her at her place on the bed, which in turn made me start laughing uncontrollably. If one of us started laughing then the other one did- we’d never even tried to figure out how to stop it. It wasn’t a problem, when I thought of it. The two of us always could have benefited from the laughter, probably.</p><p>“Today was….today was good,” I said. It was close enough to the truth, and I’d had a lot of days that actually were good lately. Compared to the kinds of days I used to have, it was good, and that was enough to make me grateful. “Slava, can I ask you something?” I said, quieter then.</p><p>“Of course. Anything,” she said, lying back on the bed with her hair fanned out and her shirt riding up to show her hipbones as I sat up on the edge of it, my feet on the ground. I felt my toes curling in.</p><p>“If you could say anything to your mother or ask her any question, what would you do?” I looked to her, then. </p><p>Slava looked at me for a moment, rising up and putting a hand on my shoulder. “You are all right?” she asked me, instead of answering me. “I know you must be thinking about her so much right now.”</p><p>I tried to smile a little at her, and shook my head, yes. “Yeah,” I said. “I have. But I think I’m all right. As all right as I can be.” And maybe that was close to really being all right, even if it didn’t always feel like it, even if maybe I wouldn’t know how to tell for real.</p><p>Slava was quiet for a moment next to me. She put one of the blankets on the bed over my shoulders, I supposed because it was cold- she was wearing an oversized thermal shirt, but having taken my coat off, I was just wearing a thin angora sweater. </p><p>“When I was young,” she finally said, her voice ending the silence like a small fire on a candle being ignited, “I thought all the time about how she died. I knew no one did it to her. But sometimes- sometimes, I wondered whether she had really fallen by accident.” Slava had been looking down and speaking gravely, as if she’d been preparing for a while to say this, but it was still coming out with difficulty. Her faltering voice, the slowness of her words. I knew I couldn’t get rid of the pain of her past any more than she could ever have done that for me. What we’d experienced was part of our lives. But we could help one another through it, and listen to one another recount it, and survive together.</p><p>Sometimes I’d wondered the same thing about Slava’s mother as a child but never asked her. She looked at me then. “There were times I wanted to ask. I did not really like the idea of knowing, of hearing. But then, if I had to ask anything, I would have asked if she meant to do it, or if she knew what was happening and didn’t try to stop herself. I would think about it all the time. If she had spent time wanting to die.” She closed her eyes and took a breath. “When I was young, I would always think to myself, I hope I never want to die.” She smiled at me sardonically, though her eyes were soft and lowered.</p><p>“Do not worry, Princess,” she told me after I was still quiet. “I do not want that. Not now.” She embraced me, which took me by surprise, but I accepted it anyway, sinking into her arms, my head lain against her shoulder.</p><p>“What would you say to her now,” I breathed out.</p><p>“Honestly?” Slava told me. “I had not thought about what I would say in years.” She seemed to ponder it for a moment.</p><p>“I hadn’t either,” I said. “Maybe not since … Amsterdam, you know.” I paused for a moment. “I think I couldn’t choose just one thing to say.” Though I’d already known that. By asking Slava, I think I was also asking, was I the only one between the two of us who, given the opportunity, would want to ask and talk, even now.</p><p>Slava nodded her head. “No,” she said, “it would not be possible to just say one thing.” She did not say if she meant for me, or her, or both of us. “I wish I could have met her,” she said to me.</p><p>I exhaled shakily. “I do too,” I said. Slava turned to me, her eyelids lowered over her dark eyes as she put an arm around my shoulder.</p><p>“I wish I could tell my mother that finding peace really can happen,” Slava said after a long silence. “That I wish she had gotten to do it too.” She shrugged. “But we do not always get what we need in our lives, do we.”</p><p>“No,” I said, my voice coming out thin and airy. “Not really.”</p><p>“So,” Slava said, a slight smile coming to her face, “it is even better when we do get what we need.” I supposed she was right. Although, for so long, I’d found it impossible to find fulfillment in any part of life given what had happened to my mother. It felt wrong to me, to not feel wrong. I thought of this now- she hadn’t gotten what she needed. Even now, I couldn’t ignore that, or look past it, even though I was doing all right, more than I ever thought I’d be able to. What I now realized was what I needed were things years ago I thought I didn’t deserve. And they were things my mother hadn’t had in her life.</p><p>“I didn’t always think about it that way,” I said. “You know. I used to think I should have died too.” I raised my head and looked her in the eye, almost afraid to ask what I was thinking. “Did you ever think…similar things?”</p><p>Slava closed her eyes for a moment. “I did, Fyodora,” she said, somberly. “I did. Every time I saw a window. When I was in withdrawal and it was the worst of it and felt like death - I wondered if I was feeling what she felt. But ever since I was a child, I realized I did not know what was in her mind when it happened. So…my question was not, was I going to end up like her. But, what would I end up like. You see the difference?”</p><p>“Yeah,” I said. I did. She had to have her own identity- she couldn’t live like her father, and regardless of whether or not she’d been like her mother, she had to make her life different anyway. She had to be her own person to live. I understood- and it had been the same for me with my father. But for my mother, sometimes I still wished I could be like her. Even though I now realized she would have loved me for who I was. I’d always wanted to be like her- I hated myself but loved her, and couldn’t perceive our similarities because of that. “I think I see a lot of things now that I never did before.”</p><p> Slava nodded, as if to herself. “Just one thing,” she began. “I will only ask one thing. I know you need the time to yourself. Sometimes we must do things alone. Just….call me when you are there.” She gave me a little smile.</p><p>“Of course, yes,” I said. “I don’t even know what exactly is going to happen…” I’d been in contact with the cemetery where my grandparents had been buried and made arrangements for my mother’s name to be engraved on the stone, and told them I wanted to come and bury her remains there. The money wasn’t an issue. Aside from that, I was going somewhere I’d never been before. Even if I should have gone before. I’d thought for years my mother’s death had stopped me from going, but maybe I just didn’t feel ready without her. “I’ll miss you,” I said. We hadn’t spent time apart in weeks- we hadn’t spent this much time together in years and years.</p><p>“I know, Princess,” she said, taking my hands. “But you will do well. You always do.”</p><p>_</p><p>I’d arrived in Kansas later in the night, which I had gotten used to in my travels. Though I was more used to going to cities, arriving at any hour to streets all lit up and at least a few people on the streets even if there were no crowds; or at least towns in the height of their vacation season- roads lined with cars, music playing somewhere in the distance, a strange feeling of closeness between the houses no matter how far apart they were. I wasn’t in either kind of place now. The night was quiet and vast- street lights every so often, broad, dark, starlit skies and low buildings.</p><p>The flight from Boston had been broken up by a layover in Texas. I’d only spent a small amount of time in the airport, though. Ironically, when I’d bought my tickets for the flight, I’d found that the city in Kansas I was landing in was called Manhattan. I hadn’t even realized it existed. And it took me a while to drive to my destination from the airport’s car rental area, but I got there. I kept envisioning myself driving throughout the night, and not finding anything, being lost. That didn’t happen. It took me a while, but I was there.</p><p>In the distance, yards away over the expanse of the road, I could make out the sign of the motel, reaching tall into the air, faded and green and white, its name and silhouettes of pine trees and wolves. Underneath it flashed <em>vacancy</em>, a red light in the darkness. A large evergreen tree next to the sign itself, its limbs thin and laden and numerous as strands of a chandelier, reaching out. A local place, not a chain. All I’d done was look online for places to stay in the area and this was one of the first places I’d found. I kept driving until I got to the parking lot, which had only a few other cars.</p><p>As I got out of the car, I looked around. There was no one. Every few moments there would be a car going by swiftly, but I was essentially alone. In the cold, the open air provided no distractions. It was refreshing for a moment, but I knew I was right to have worn by thickest coat, which hit my ankles and was black. Slava had chosen it for me as a gift. I leaned against the car for a moment, looking over at the motel. Maybe I should have been afraid, but any fear in traveling I may have had, worn off years ago. And I wasn’t afraid to be alone. No, the thing that seemed to loom over me was the fact that I had no idea if I’d do anything right here, in a place I’d never been, and maybe I would prove to just be a disappointment to my mother after all. But those were just fears in the back of my mind, and they’d been proven wrong before. I had gone to places I’d never been before, and done all right. I had realized that my mother had never found me a disappointment in life, and she’d always made it clear to me that she loved me and accepted me- and she always would.</p><p>I had gone into so many unfamiliar places in the night before. But this one, though I’d never been, I knew about. I’d been told about in my childhood routinely. It was a part of my mother- a part of me.</p><p>I walked towards the motel. </p><p>_</p><p>That night in my motel room, beneath the thick and used comforter, asleep despite the blaring of a loud phone conversation in the next room that kept me up later than I anticipated, I dreamed.</p><p>I was in the deserts of Nevada, off the side of the highway, with myself at fourteen. It was the middle of the day, bright and clear. She- I – had her back turned to me at first, facing the road as if waiting for a car. Her faded Bebe t-shirt with missing rhinestones, one of Xandra’s hand-me-downs I recognized, was large on her small frame, and she wore no shoes, instead holding them in her hands. Her feet were clouded with dust. I looked down, and had shoes on. I could not feel the ground beneath me.</p><p>“You’re not really here,” she said to me, her eyes large like she hadn’t yet grown into them, and so wide on her young face, as though they were constantly alert with all she’d seen. She held sand in her hands, red and thick, some grains escaping through her fingers.</p><p>“You are,” I told her, as gently and firmly as I could. “You have to be here.” There was no sound at all in the world. No breeze, no passing cars, no birds. “I’m sorry,” I added.  </p><p>She shook her head at me. “I mean… <em>you’re </em>not really here.” Her eyes were tired, and her voice worn out, but she meant her words.</p><p>“I know. But… you’re going to be me one day,” I said, feeling like I had to tell her this if she was going to say things to me.</p><p>“Okay,” she said quietly. “I will.” She went quiet, seeming to ponder over it. She brought her hands up to her mouth and ate the sand, swallowing it whole. Then she looked back to me. There were no remnants of the sands on her lips or face. But the desert had made its way into her all the same. I wondered what I looked like, what she saw. “Look. You can see the moon.”</p><p>I looked up. The pale circle of the moon was translucently visible in the cloudless sky. I heard thunder, but could not see any lightning, or anything else in the sky aside from the moon.</p><p>When I woke up the roaring of the thunder was coming every few seconds, and I could see blue and silver and purple flashes of lightning outside the window. I turned my head, laying on my side to watch the storm until I could fall back asleep. I didn’t move, didn’t look away from it. I suppose I stayed there until I fell asleep again.</p><p>_</p><p>Since I never drew the curtain closed, I woke up when the room filled with light early in the winter morning, the sun blaring whitish-gold in the sky, its pale color evident of a cold day. I tried to sleep a little while longer, but eventually realized I was completely awake, and dragged myself out of the bed, my bare feet hitting the thick carpeted floor, my toes sinking into its thick fibers like it was a field of grass.</p><p>Next to me I saw the motel’s nightstand, wooden and old; it had lived possibly a life for every guest- I had set out what I needed for the day, or days, ahead of me.</p><p>The first was a few printouts from the local newspaper that had my mother’s obituary, but not only that, the name of the man who’d written it, and another page with the headquarters of the newspaper confirming what I’d found on the internet. Good thing it was a weekday, I thought- even though this paper seemed to circulate during the weekend, too, you never knew when something would be closed; weekdays were more reliable, I’d known that from experience, living and working in the shop.</p><p>Next to it was my handbag- I’d brought one of my smaller and delicate but practical ones, as I usually did when I traveled. It had inside my New York and Massachusetts State ID’s, my driver’s license, and my passport, in case I needed to prove to anyone I was my mother's daughter- this was a small town, but it had been years since she’d lived there and years since the obituary was written and I had no real idea what I was walking into. The fact that this is how I’d gone about a lot of my life was a bit intimidating, but not in a way I wasn’t accustomed to, not in a way that would effectively scare enough to not try in the first place. If my mother could visit me across life and death, I could at least take a trip to her hometown.</p><p>And then there was my phone, which I hadn’t checked all night. I went to see if I had messages, and saw that Slava had texted me hours ago- <em>hope everything is ok! all of my love. </em>I messaged her back:</p><p>
  <em>Just woke up. I think everything is ok. I miss you. Please take care of yourself. </em>
</p><p>I reflected on how I wasn’t thinking about the possibilities of the days Slava had ahead of her in terms of life or death matters. I didn’t have to worry about whether I’d come home to find her strung out on the bathroom floor or in bed, her pupils the size of pinpricks, new track marks up and down her arms; if she’d find new things and be dead and OD’d with Oxy or fentanyl in her system behind the door when I came back. It wasn’t just that I didn’t have to, it was that I didn’t at all think about it. So soon, I’d gotten used to the idea that we were going to be all right. I didn’t know if that was freeing or dangerous. I had experience enough to know that sometimes things can feel like both, but I wasn’t sure in this case.</p><p>But I knew she didn’t have to worry that way about me, and I don’t think she did. Though, I did think we’d always be concerned about one another, even have a little fear on behalf of what could befall the other. Maybe that made sense. </p><p>I looked around the room. It was one of the few singles at the motel, and thankfully I’d gotten it. It would have felt strange to me to sleep in a room with another unused bed. After getting out of the bed, pushing back the covers, I went to my suitcase. I had arrived so late last night I hadn’t unpacked. I chose a plain long sleeved black dress from Victorian Maiden, pairing it with my long coat and a lambswool tartan-patterned scarf in dark blue, rich green, and black. I kept my makeup subtle and minimal.</p><p>On top of the bureau, I’d set my mother’s urn. I looked at it for a moment before I knew I had to get out and begin the day. And for the first time, see the place my mother had came from.</p><p>_</p><p>If I put it off, I wouldn’t ever get around to doing it, I’d get too afraid, I thought. And so when I traveled I never put off what I had to do. I never got to prove my theory that I’d fail if I wasn’t efficient in my tasks. But I also didn’t want to. Slava had asked me what dangerous things I’d gotten up to all around the world, Hobie had asked me if I was enjoying myself on the trips, Philip would sometimes ask me about different cities and Mrs. Barbour would sometimes ask me if I’d gotten to see this or that museum. No one really wanted to talk about the actual reselling, the reason why I had traveled the world in the first place.</p><p>Frankly, I didn’t know very much about this town in the current day at all. What I did know was told to me by my mother, and small towns can stay the same over a long time, but who knew how much had changed in the decades since she’d been here. When I’d traveled before, it was an appointment, I would go to someone, the plain was already laid out, people knew I was coming. I’d had to make my own plan here. My mother’s influence was what kept me from thinking of myself as completely alone. Who knew- maybe I’d be a surprise to people who remembered my mother, if I found any people who remembered her. I hoped I would. I hoped I wouldn’t disappoint them. But I could probably take that if it meant I didn’t have to come here and find no one remembered her.</p><p>In my car, I followed the directions I’d printed out back in Massachusetts that led me from the address of the motel to the address of the newspaper. It wasn’t very long, and the town was small but expansive. Long, wide roads; areas sparse with buildings; old signs and storefronts, some closed down with window boarding, some not abandoned at all, bold and standing out. Trees on the sidewalks, reddish-brown and bristly in the glow of the morning light, having lost their leaves. I wondered how much was the same, how much would be recognizable to my mother. If she’d been into any of these buildings and if they were the same businesses in her time, if she’d walked by the very same trees, if she’d stared down the road ahead of her in my exact position looking over at the horizon, wondering how far over the line she’d manage to travel one day, or looking up at the sky in this exact spot and being satisfied where she was. </p><p>When I got to the destination, I was almost surprised by how small the building was. White bricks and a black newspaper-like font heralding the building name on the signage. Telephone poles and street lights towering over everything nearby. I was in the right place. I found a parking spot that didn’t seem to be for employees only, though I wasn’t sure. I took my bag, straightened my glasses, looked in the car’s mirror, and took a deep breath. I hoped, somehow, my mother could understand I was doing all this not so I could put our time together behind me and forget and “let go” (a favorite phrase of many people over years who thought they were helping me with unsolicited philosophy), but so I could remember.</p><p>I walked up to the door, and found it was unlocked. There was a desk and a receptionist near the front of the room, a flaxen-blonde girl with loose waves of hair and wire glasses, and a name tag that read <em>Gail</em>. “May I help you?” she asked, looking at me for a long moment, as if trying to place who I was supposed to be.</p><p>“Um,” I began, “I don’t have an appointment, and I don’t know if I needed one to come here. I don’t really know who to ask here. But I have an obituary,” I pulled it out of my bag, “from some years ago, but it was-” I tried to find the right words and really wished I’d thought more about what I’d say before I came in. I’d never had an issue thinking on my feet lying to wealthy, ignorant clientele at Hobie’s shop; I’d spent my whole life around their kind being underestimated. This was completely different. I was being truthful and the truth was, I didn’t know if anyone here knew or cared who I was or who my mother was, or if anyone would be willing to help. “It may have been a somewhat well-known article due to its relevance to the current events at the time.”</p><p>Fuck, I thought, that was what her death and my near-death had been: current events at the time. Sometimes I felt irresponsible for not periodically checking up on the news stories about the perpetrators- the ones who were caught and the ones who weren’t. Would my mother have wanted me to know, for her sake, for my own? How did I know they didn’t know exactly who I was, especially since the news had made sure of broadcasting who I was to anyone listening? But, I thought- if they were going to find me, I already knew what they were like without a televised jailhouse interview. And, I knew, and was proven on several circumstances, even without them, there was no shortage in the world of people who would cause me danger if given the opportunity.</p><p>“Anyway,” I continued. “I’m sorry if this isn’t what your job is. My name is Theodora Decker?” It came out as a question. “Audrey Youngbird,” I extended the paper so Gail could see better, “she was my mother. Maybe she’s in some databases or something under the surname Decker. I just wanted to know if I could be put in contact with the writer of this obituary.”</p><p>Gail pushed up her glasses and looked closer, narrowing her eyes to see better. I tried to read the expressions on her face. <em>This sure is from a long time ago, I don’t know what I can do. Oh, the Museum Attack, of course, I’m so sorry, Attack Girl. What the fuck kind of daughter are you to only come now? Oh, I can tell you’re from New York, with that rough accent and your weird clothes, even if you didn’t tell me you’re the daughter of that teen runaway from that strange family. </em>I wasn’t sure if any of them were in her. She seemed to be reading the paper, actually. I felt something sharp on my mouth and realized I was biting my lip.</p><p>“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling like I’d better apologize before she made me feel like I should apologize for coming to Kansas in the first place. “If there’s another person you can direct me to, I’ll let you go back to your work-”</p><p>“No, don’t worry,” Gail said, somewhat distractedly. She’d opened up a drawer in her desk and seemed to be going through an address book. “The name on that obituary is Michael Weshock?” I nodded. “We know him,” she said, looking through her desk still. “He’s written in articles, a few obituaries, some op-ed’s, things like that over the years.”</p><p>“Oh,” I said, not knowing what to say about the fact that not only did this man know my mother, he was still around here, this man whose eulogy of my mother I’d read countless times once I’d found the article. Granted, I’d only found the article recently because when I was younger, I couldn’t have done it, I wasn’t ready to see it. I wondered for a brief moment if I wasn’t ready to have visited yet, if I still needed to take it one very long step at a time. “So he doesn’t work here?” I asked, which I immediately realized was obvious. I took a long exhale. Gail looked me in the eye. She had just read about what had happened to my mother, what had happened to me. I was waiting for something terrible to happen- I didn’t have good experiences, usually, with people who knew. I could hear people behind closed doors in other rooms talking, vaguely, but could not make out any words.</p><p>“No. But we can put you in contact with him,” she said. I’d thought it would have been a lot harder, but maybe the hard part would come later.</p><p>“Okay,” I managed to say, trying to keep my voice even.</p><p>She wrote down something on a piece of paper and handed it to me. “This is his phone number. He might be out and he might be in. But if he’s out I’m sure he’ll get back to you. He’s very reliable in our experience.” What if he doesn’t pick up, what if he never calls back, I thought for a panicked moment.</p><p> “Thank you so much,” I said, waiting for my first out. The room was small and the walls looked like they were about to close in or crumble at any point. To do this I’d had to reveal so much about myself to a complete stranger, albeit one I’d likely never see again, but I could picture her talking to friends- <em>do you remember the Museum Attack in New York? This girl who survived it came in, she was that New York model runaway chick's daughter, remember the woman your parents went to school with, Ashleigh? Anyway she was acting really bizarre. It’s kind of sad, you could tell part of her still is in the museum, you know? </em></p><p>“Is there anything else?” Gail asked. I shook my head, maybe a bit too quickly. “Have a good day!” she said as I abruptly turned around and began to walk out, the paper gripped in my hand like it was my shield and I was walking onto the front line of a battlefield.</p><p>I drove as swiftly, but safely, as I could away from the parking lot, far away from the sight of the news building, until I came to some side road without many people, only a few cars. I pulled over and parked, and dug out my cell phone from my bag. <em>I’m doing it, Mom, </em>I thought.</p><p>If I had known that loving her would be what eventually led me to not hating myself anymore, not being as afraid anymore, it probably wouldn’t have taken me so long to get there.</p><p>I felt my fingers shake as I dialed the number. It rang a few times and I was preparing myself to have to leave a message when the line picked up. “Hello?” the sound of an older man’s voice came. I was so surprised it took me a moment.</p><p>“Um,” I began shakily, “are you Michael Weshock?”</p><p>“Yes,” he said, and after a moment, “who is this?” Just plainly, like he wanted to know, not like I was bothering him, not like he was about to hang up. I took a deep breath.</p><p>“Okay. You don’t know me but you knew my mother, and that’s why I’m calling you. You wrote her obituary in 2004. I didn’t even see the article until I found it online recently. My name is-” I swallowed, having rushed out the past few sentences, like if I didn’t say them quickly, I’d never be able to. “My name is Theodora Decker. I’m Audrey’s daughter.” I barely paused. “Thank you for writing it. It was a truly beautiful piece of writing. I’m glad you did it. I couldn’t have back then,” I added, not sure whether or not I should have been cursing myself for saying that.</p><p>I heard his breathing through the phone. “We should talk,” he said.</p><p>“I was hoping you would say that,” I told him breathlessly. “I…I took an airplane to Kansas yesterday. I’m burying her. Her ashes. I know we don’t know each other but…you knew her.” I was hoping all of that would speak for itself and that I could keep myself from saying everything that came to mind.</p><p>“So you’re here?” he asked, confirming. “Then we should really speak in person,” he said. “I think that would be best.”</p><p>“I do too,” I said, almost in disbelief. “Thank you so much. Mr. Weshock.”</p><p>“You almost sound like her,” he said to me, “and you can just call me Michael”. I didn’t know how to respond. “I’m glad you found what I wrote. I was hoping one day you would.” I was speechless, unsure of what I was supposed to tell him.</p><p>“I’m here until the end of the week,” I said breathlessly. “I can meet wherever you like. Almost any time.” There was one day, the last full day in Kansas, I’d set aside for the burial.</p><p>“Would tomorrow be all right, Theodora?” he asked, gently. “You can come to my house.”</p><p>“Yes,” I said, unsure of how to describe the emotion pulsating through my voice, only that it was there. But I supposed he’d understand. “Yes, that would be more than all right.” He told me his address, and I wrote it down with a small motel pencil on the paper Gail had given me. I closed my eyes as he asked me what time would be best, and took deep breaths, in and out. I would not allow myself to cry until I hung up. I wasn’t thinking about whether I’d be a disappointment compared to my mother, or if I sounded like a stalker, or if I was doomed to somehow ruin this, not in that moment, I wasn’t. I put my hand to my forehead, exhilarated, unsure of how to react to this rare feeling. I sounded like her. My mother had died, but she’d also lived. And I had, as well. I was alive, and I felt both our lives inside of me, alert and awake, and ready.</p><p>_</p><p>That night I went to a local bar, wanting to see what it was like, this town.</p><p>The strip it was on was a low, long building, with a motel heralded by a green sign at the far end of it, but not the one I was staying in. I’d already briefly eaten at the motel restaurant, feeling I had to eat something eventually. I walked out of it. Bright American flags in front of nearby houses and buildings that looked like they were built possibly in the 70s, stars and stripes printed on banners hanging on the streetlights. A network of unhindered telephone poles and wires, stretching across the street, along the grass at the side of the roads. a Long, straight roads with highway numbers painted on the asphalt right alongside the dividing lines in the middle of the road. The sky so fast and clear it almost seemed close. Down the street, a white badge and a white building, advertising oil.</p><p>The unusual quality of small towns, I saw, was that they were often not small at all. They could be, like this one, so vast it would seem to take up as much room, or more, than any city- the lack of crowds and density emphasizing the expanse of the area. Maybe that is why so many children of the small towns are called to cities- not just because they want to get away, but because they think they can handle it. A small town is a small world in a large space, but a city is a thousand small worlds all together in a large space. I wonder if that was what my mother thought. The city was calling her, not because it was calling her far away from living with her aunt who hated her and called her a sinner and told her that her parents were sinners too and she would always be a sinner as long as she was like them, but because it gave her the freedom to navigate her own world, choose a part of the city and stay.</p><p>The parking lot was so close to the bar I decided to leave my coat in the car, even if I realized I wouldn’t get to use it as armor against guys who used how I dressed (which was to say, often unusually) as an opportunity to get a little too close to me. They’d use another excuse anyway if they were going to, I thought wearily, hoping it at least would be heated inside. There were a few chairs outside, facing the street; two older men sitting in them, holding beers. I wondered if they ran the place, but did not ask. Walking in, I saw that it almost looked like a diner or a pizzeria, with red leather booths, a shining brown wooden bar top, low ceilings and some areas with red bricks on the wall. Vaguely, I thought I should text Kara about where I was- I’d told her I wanted to see her during the vacation, but I hadn’t told her about this trip, not yet. I’d do it later, I thought.</p><p>Some new country song I didn’t recognize was playing, and there were some people inside- a younger couple, a group of guys watching a football game on the TV, a few older people who I sensed were staying in the motel rooms, having the look of lone travelers that I could detect from my own experience. I did not want to stay frozen in the doorway, so I walked ahead, and got a seat at the bar where I could see out the window onto the street.</p><p>The bartender, a broad-shouldered man with graying hair, stepped forward. I’d barely noticed him, and I wonder if anyone was paying any mind to me- the guys watching sports a few seats down from me hadn’t turned yet. I wondered if the older people who I thought were staying at the nearby motel had seen me, and had said to themselves, this one isn’t from here either.</p><p>“What will you have tonight, miss?” he asked.</p><p>Strangely, I realized, I hadn’t even been thinking about ordering anything, just going in and being there. It had been a while since I’d done such a thing. Even in my months in Mashpee when I lived by myself, I usually didn’t even go to restaurants unless I was picking up takeout, or on a few occasions when Kara and I had gone out. Going out alone was something I’d thought would only end badly, but now, I realized, that was because it was during a time when pretty much everything in my life was going badly. I didn’t have to be afraid of the whole world, even if I was being careful and cautious.</p><p>My mother hadn’t been afraid of the whole world. I think when she was alive she was trying to teach me not to be.</p><p>“Oh,” I said, a little startled by such direct attention. “Well…I think I’ll just have a Pabst Blue Ribbon.” Then, since I realized I was driving, I decided to not drink it until later. “Thank you,” I said as the bartender handed it to me.</p><p>“Are you staying at the motel?” he asked. I supposed he knew a lot about the town, working there, and not recognizing me and not seeing anyone in there recognizing me made it evident I wasn’t from around there.</p><p>“Not this one,” I said, “but I’m staying here for some time.” I paused, thinking he probably wanted to know why. “I’m…visiting family,” I said. And the group of guys called for another round, and the bartender went over to them, and I took a deep breath and looked out the window. The road separated this side of the street from the other, this motel and restaurant and bar on one side and the homes on the other. The streetlights shone yellow in the thick rural dark of the night, the kind you could lose yourself in. Like a desert in the blazing sunlight- unyielding and in its element. A few cars drove by, one of them honking its horn at presumably the two men sitting out front, because I heard them call back.</p><p>I thought of Hopper’s <em>Nighthawks</em>- if anyone was looking in, that was likely similar to what they saw. A small corner of nightlife in the quiet dark, not even half full, lone figures and small groups in the windows like scenes in a faraway movie screen. Why are the people there and what are they saying and doing? Do they see me, I wondered, the people outside, the people inside, and what do they see when they look at me?</p><p>Loretta Lynn was playing on the radio- <em>nobody knows where you're goin', but they sure know where you've been</em>… I’d known too well what that meant in my life. I looked out of the window, into the late winter night, and wondered what my mother had seen when she looked out at this town years ago.</p><p>_</p><p>That night in my motel room, I took sips of the now warm Pabst (which I didn’t really intend to finish) after washing my hair, wringing it dry with a towel and sitting at the edge of the bed with my warmest bathrobe and flannel nightgown on (“All that lace and flowers,” Slava had said of it, “you are sure that is for sleeping?”).</p><p>I was supposed to meet Michael tomorrow. It was already late at night, but the meeting- though that was likely too formal of a descriptor for what it would be like given how welcoming he sounded, it felt serious enough for me to think of it like that- was in the afternoon. I suspected it would go on for quite some time. I wasn’t sure whether to look forward to it or be nervous, and I wasn’t sure how to describe what I was feeling but it seemed to include a bit of both, but either way, I feared I would be up all night, unable to sleep.</p><p>Somehow, though, I drifted away to sleep, as usual. I woke up late in the morning with no memory of dreams, my arms wrapped around the pillows, pale whitish morning sunlight blearing through the space between the curtains. I pulled the covers over me, looking at the digital clock’s early hour, and closed my eyes again, thinking of Slava encircling me whenever we went to sleep, her chest rising and falling against my back as she breathed next to my ear, my arms entangled with hers as she lay one over my waist and put her other hand at my shoulder.</p><p>_</p><p>I slept late but decided, however, to get ready earlier than I may have needed to, so that I could drive around, make sure I had my bearings and could get to Michael’s house at the right time. I tied my hair back with a rose colored ribbon to get it out of my way in case the merciless Kansas winter weather decided on wind, which it seemed like it was doing from what I could hear from inside the motel. I put on my thickest sweater, an ice-gray knit cowl neck, with a white wool skirt. I found that I was pacing around the motel room so quickly I was almost getting dizzy. So I stopped walking, and took a deep breath and closed my eyes, tilting back my head. When I opened my eyes the popcorn ceiling, a plain white, looked so constant I focused on it for a moment. I was here, and that was fine, I was supposed to be here. I was fine, I told myself. I didn’t have to be so nervous about everything.</p><p>Really, my nervousness was because I was afraid that I would get a chance to meet someone who could connect to me over my mother, and that I would be a disappointment. I often tried to reassure myself by reminding myself how much my mother loved me unconditionally, but then, most people didn’t love me at all, and because of that I’d spent years thinking they were all onto something. What if I ended up saying all the wrong things, giving a horrible impression? If I was nervous and inarticulate and couldn’t get anything across. If I said too much about myself, the things that didn’t need to be told, or if I couldn’t say enough about my mother.</p><p>Sure, my mother had loved me, and if she was alive, she still would. But was I really the best person to memorialize her, to eulogize her, to speak as her representative on earth now that she was no longer alive to speak for herself? I was her daughter, so I should have been. But I found myself worrying that I wasn’t.</p><p>I took a drink of water, which helped my dry throat, and put on a beret to brace myself for the cold. Something about all the open air made it hit me full force, deep in my bones, and I didn’t even typically mind winter. It was a pure season, one of clarity, really thinking about life rather than just drifting through it. It had more good memories for me than other seasons. It wasn’t spring, at least.</p><p>But I went outside and let the winter air envelope me, pass through me like I was immersed in it, again and again as each wave of wind came forward. The outsides of the motel windows, and those on the cars, too, were edged in frost, delicate and uniquely patterned as lace.</p><p>I vaguely hoped that today I didn’t look like I was about to cry, as I’d been told on occasion that this was how my face often looked even if I wasn’t sad at all. This was good, I told myself. He wants to see me, my mother wouldn’t want me to feel like this. I thought then, that I really did want to do it. I always was afraid of what I wanted. But lately, I’d been trying not to be, and sometimes, it really felt like I was succeeding.</p><p>I got into the car and pulled out of the lot, getting on the road, trying to find my way to the house. I was ready, I told myself, as the wind screamed outside the windows and the clouded gray sky, clouds thick with unshed precipitation, surrounded the town around me like I was in a snow-globe. I exhaled, my breath visible in a cloud, in the car that I hadn’t heated up. It vanished as quickly as a smoke ring, like I’d never breathed, but it came again when I next exhaled. As if to say, it is winter and I am alive. </p><p>_</p><p>When I found Michael’s house, I parked in front and stayed in the car for a few minutes. While I was in there I wondered if he saw me, if he was wondering what was taking me so long, or if he didn’t even see me yet. I wondered what kind of person he was expecting- we hadn’t talked much, after all. He had to have some kind of impression of who I was from how I spoke on the phone. Eventually I realized there was no real reason for staying in so long and that I wouldn’t have a good excuse, so I walked up and knocked on the door. There was a doorbell, but I decided to knock anyway. I pounded my fist against the dark wooden door a few times until I could feel my knuckles hurt, then drew back my hand to my side, as if I’d gone too far and needed to show I was withdrawing.</p><p>Within a few moments I heard the door begin to open, and as it did, I felt some of the tension leave my body, now that it was all actually happening. I’d been through much more stressful things, I thought, and lately, I reminded myself, I was learning how to let myself accept good things.</p><p>When the door opened I saw the face of a middle-aged man, maybe someone around the age of my mother had she lived, give or take some years. He wore a red plaid flannel shirt and dark blue jeans, and had clear, dark skin, and dark eyes, and long black hair with a few silver strands here and there. I was silent for a moment, not sure what to say. He looked at me, realizing who I was. “You’re Audrey’s daughter, all right,” he said, and then smiling a little bit. “Go ahead, come in,” he said, “I wish this could have happened sooner, and not this way. But you’re here now,” he said as he walked in and I followed.</p><p>“Yeah,” I said quietly, but not too quiet to be heard, “I guess that’s the best way of thinking about it.” I looked at my feet. “Would you like me to take my shoes off?” I asked. “Thank you for- for having me over.”</p><p>“Do what you want,” Michael said, but since I saw he wasn’t wearing shoes, I left my shoes by the door. “And of course,” he added, gently, but with emphasis on his words. “She always said she wanted to bring you back here one day.”</p><p>“Wait,” I said, “what?” I knew she talked about traveling with me, and I believed I remembered her wanting to take me to where she grew up- here and some of the other places. I asked her once if she wanted to show me her aunt’s house but my mother looked at me and said the house was demolished years ago, was now part of a townhouse complex, and sometimes there isn’t anything to go back to, and we should feel fortunate when there is. I asked her if she felt fortunate about her aunt’s house not being there any longer. And she said sometimes, but sometimes she dreamed about those days, and wondered if she’d be more at peace with it if she could visit the house where she’d been forced to live. But I hadn’t recalled her saying she told other people, people who she knew from before New York.</p><p>“Why don’t you take a seat, Theodora,” Michael advised me, gesturing towards a leathery black couch up against the wood-paneled wall. “Do you want anything to drink?”</p><p>“I’m fine for now, thank you,” I said. “But…she told you?” I asked, not sure how to phrase my question or where to begin. I took off my coat and folded it over the arm of the couch.</p><p>He nodded. “We didn’t speak as much as we did when we were growing up, but we remained close. She never forgot people. We were friends up until she died. Sometimes we’d speak on the phone. But she’d usually do it when no one was home. I understand your father caused a lot of problems for the both of you,” he said, after a pause.</p><p>“You can say that again,” I told him dryly, trying to smile. Then I thought for a moment- my father, defensively looking at me when he sensed my shock at him and Xandra appearing in New York, going through my mother’s things. <em>She wasn’t perfect, she had her own issues,</em> or whatever he’d said, my father drunkenly starting arguments when my mother got off the phone, <em>you can’t talk to me but you can talk to whoever the fuck that is?</em> As an adult looking back, I wondered why I hadn’t picked up on it. I took a deep breath. “We were both better off without him, while it lasted.” I wondered if that made me sound like I was happy he died- but I realized maybe Michael didn’t even know my father was dead.</p><p>“I’m sorry. I really am,” he said to me, then continued. “Your mother would tell me about her life, and you.” I didn’t know whether or not to feel like I was in bad taste for hoping he didn’t know too much about me when I was that age- sometimes I felt that who I was at that age was better off forgotten. “I tried to get ahold of you afterwards. But her phone I suppose was lost in the explosion, and your house phone got disconnected. After that, I assumed you were sent to foster care,” he said tentatively, with regret in his voice.</p><p>“No,” I explained, “thankfully, no. Some family friends took me in for a while, which maybe wasn’t great for me- although I suppose that’s a long story- and then my father came back, and that’s another long story. But he came back and off I went to Las Vegas with him,” I said, unenthusiastically. I laughed a little. “Every day was a surprise.”</p><p>“Christ...” Michael said. I laughed again, at first bitterly, and then just at how surreal it all was.</p><p>“I know,” I said, “you can definitely say that again. But I mean. It wasn’t all bad. I made one of the greatest friends I’ve ever had there, and we really kept each other alive, I think. I’m not exaggerating. That’s another long story, I guess.”</p><p>“I don’t mind long stories,” Michael told me, shrugging. “Why do you think I invited you over? We both have a lot to catch up on.”</p><p>I was quiet for a moment. “How did you know my mother?” I asked.</p><p>He exhaled, taking a glass of water I hadn’t noticed from the table in front of the couch. “Are you sure you don’t want anything to drink?” he asked. I shook my head as he drank, and then he began speaking. “We were neighbors from childhood. We could both see Coldwater Lake if we looked out through the windows, and she’d always look out the windows and say all the places she could get to if she just walked out and kept walking. ‘But then I’d come back,’ she’d always say. She would always say she wanted to go around the world but it wouldn’t be anything to enjoy if she could never come home. It would be like being locked outside, she said.” I processed that- it made sense as something she’d say, given how she’d tell me about being homesick but loving to go around the country with her family, and eventually moving to New York. I’d thought that small towns couldn’t fit her. But maybe it was more complicated than that. She’d been dead when I was in Park Avenue and it was clear there wasn’t any room for both of us, let alone one. “I thought of that for years after what happened,” he said, as if confessing.</p><p>“When she died I’d think about a lot of things she’d said and did. I couldn’t forget. I thought it was my fault. I would just go over my memories thinking that if I’d done something different, if I’d known better, maybe she’d still be alive,” I said. “I know it doesn’t work like that now. But I still think about a lot of things and … wish they had been different.”</p><p>“It’s only natural to have those thoughts,” he told me, with the recognition of someone who’d done the same. We were both quiet for a moment, our reflections vaguely appearing in the turned-off television across from us, resting on top of a cabinet. Next to it, on the walls, were photographs, of Michael and other people I didn’t recognize. Some I took to be friends, some I assumed were siblings, nieces, nephews. Behind me I’d noticed were more photographs of the sort, and some others- photographs of what I assumed was Lake Coldwater, a closeup of a deer in the dark of night, others. I wondered if any of these were his photographs that had ended up in the paper. In the corner of my eye, near the dimly lit hallway, an older and faded photograph of a boy and a girl, who I knew even before I looked closer, that it was of Michael and my mother. But I didn’t ask him about that.</p><p>“You’re a photographer?” I asked, even though I already knew and had been told.</p><p>“I am,” he said, “thank you for noticing.”</p><p>“No problem,” I said, “I’m interested in art….she was too. But I’m sure you know that….are your photographs things you put in the paper too?” I asked. I just wanted to hear him talk about it.</p><p>“Sometimes,” he said. “I submit some things, but I don’t really work for them specifically. I do my work freelance.”</p><p>“I think that’s sometimes the best way to do it,” I said. “I mean, I don’t really call myself an artist or anything. Definitely not anymore.” </p><p>He looked at me, interested. “You must have known her favorite painting was the Goldfinch. The one that was found in perfect condition halfway across the world.” I didn’t really want the conversation to go this way, and was somewhat surprised, even though I thought by now I should never be surprised by anything.</p><p>“It was,” I said.</p><p>“I knew she was raising you with art- not just going to museums, but all kinds of things. I never even thought of fashion as art before she talked about it to me.” I hadn’t either, I thought, and wondered if I’d even think more than a few seconds about clothes as anything aside from things to cover yourself up in and possible ways to convey status and wealth if I hadn’t had my mother’s influence, just my father’s. “You said you don’t call yourself an artist <em>anymore</em>?”</p><p>“Well,” I said, “I don’t make anything anymore. I’m an art teacher at a school. But I used to work in antiques, restoration, that kind of thing.” I was quiet for a moment and realized at this point I had nothing to lose by being truthful here. “I may as well just tell you that this was after my father died- wait, you don’t know about that. When I was sixteen my father died in a car crash so I went back to New York and lived with my legal guardian who was…an adult who I knew and trusted and took me in when I had nowhere to go.” That was, I supposed, the best way of explaining it quickly. “He ran an antique store but he was going to go bankrupt and maybe get evicted so…I started creating replicas of antiques. They were good. I put a lot of work in them. And when I told the customers they were real, they paid a lot of money, and... After a while I felt horrible, for lying to my guardian, and doing what I did, because he could have gotten in a lot of legal trouble, because what I did was fraud. And they might not have been able to prove he didn’t have anything to do with it.” I was looking down at my hands while saying this, as it all came out in a rush. “But….I don’t feel as bad now. Because I bought it all back, and my guardian is doing all right now, and his business is better, and we’re still close. It didn’t ruin our relationship. And…I don’t really say this a lot, but I don’t really feel bad about lying to the people who fell for it.” I looked Michael in the eye then, wondering yet again what he saw. My mother never did some of the things I did, I knew.</p><p>“Did you think you had to do it?” he asked me, with no judgment at all.</p><p>“At the time, I did,” I said. “At least most of the time. And I knew if I didn’t, there was nothing else I knew how to do that would help.”</p><p>He looked at me like he understood what I meant completely and nodded. Then he continued on. “Well. When your mother went on the road with her family, I’d sometimes get postcards from all over from her. All these different places- Texas, Montana, Arizona, places I’d never seen in my life. It sounded like an incredible experience, and she seemed fine, even though she kept saying she wanted to come back. Eventually she did because her parents were both getting sick.” I looked down, nodding in understanding.</p><p>“It was a bad couple of years for her,” he told me, his voice lowering. I could hear his sorrow for her, for her family. “She was inside her house a lot. And I’d come visit, and there was such a sadness in her, weighing her down. I tried to support her as best as I could. I was one of her few friends then.” His voice was sad, but even, like he’d thought of this time a lot, and could speak of it, like it was something that needed to be said. “And then when they were both gone, the authorities came to take her to her aunt.” His voice then was tense. He took a drink of water and I could see how his hands gripped the glass.</p><p>“I knew about that part,” I said quietly, looking down at the floor. Thinking of being in the diner with the social workers. Thinking of waking up every night alone in Platt’s room screaming, and being given pills to swallow with mineral water so cold it hurt my throat. Thinking of how my mother told me, in her aunt’s house, she always wanted to run away, and her aunt knew she wasn’t happy there and would say, take a good look outside, you have nowhere to go and you know it.</p><p>“She ended up some town north of Wichita. I got a few phone calls every once in a while, when her aunt wasn’t there. She told me it was best if I didn’t call the house. At first I thought it was because her aunt didn’t want her talking to boys, but your mother, she told me it was because her aunt would be angry if she knew she was talking to anyone from her old town.” I closed my eyes for a moment. “Audrey would always say, I’m going to get out of here and never look back. And I asked her if she ever wanted to come home, and she said, I have no home anymore. And then she said, no, I don’t mean I’ll never come back. I’ll come back. And I believed she would, because she sounded like she wanted to. But I think she meant it when she said she had no home. Here,” he gestured in a circle with his hand indicating the town, “it wasn’t home for her anymore.”</p><p>“That was how it was for me,” I said quietly, “after she died. I spent all my time in Vegas wanting to get out of there but when I finally had to, it was like New York was a different place from what I remembered. I felt at home with my guardian, but once I stepped outside, the city felt like the last place I belonged. Sometimes I felt like I didn’t belong anywhere. But I don’t feel that so much lately.” He nodded in understanding, like he knew exactly what I meant. I inhaled, leaning back into the couch. “She should be here with me,” I said. “Then I’d know I was doing this right.”</p><p>Michael looked to me and put his hand on my shoulder. “Theodora,” he said firmly, encouragingly, “you’re doing it. You’re here. You’re not doing anything wrong. And your mother might not be here, but she’s always going to be with you. She lived, and you’re alive. You can continue where she left off.”</p><p>I bit my lip, my throat too thick to speak for a moment, and rubbed at my eye as I took a hard swallow. “All right,” I said shakily. “All right. That makes sense. Thank you.”</p><p>“I’d hear from her every once in a while when she got to New York,” he said, taking my hand, as if to calm me. “One day I picked up the phone, we were both maybe seventeen, and she said guess who it is! I’m finally out of there, and I’m waiting tables now, but who knows what can happen next because I’m in New York.” I smiled a little. We’d both gotten away, made our own choices where the authorities would have made them for us. “Yeah,” he said, “it was-  great news to hear. She was doing well. She was free. And she always told me I should come out and visit her.” His voice was full of regret and he shook his head. “I wish I had.”</p><p>“I wish you had too,” I said. “I think we both would have liked that a lot.” Outside, I could hear a car screech to a halt. “Michael….did you love her,” I asked, barely sounding like a question. I needed to know that someone had loved her, in that way, someone who actually knew her, someone who cared about her.</p><p>“In our way, we loved each other,” he told me after a moment, looking right at me. “But we lived different lives, and if our lives hadn’t gone so differently…” he stopped for a moment. “I have to say. Your father had no reason to be as jealous of me as I think he was. But even if we never really said it to each other in those words, we loved each other.” I could hear in his voice, see in his eyes that stared at the wall opposite us, that he regretted never saying it more than anything else. Sometimes, the things that make the most sense to regret are the things we easily could have done.</p><p>I wasn’t crying, but I felt a slight wetness in my eyes, like a few snowflakes had landed in the corners of my eyes. “I’d like to ask you to come to the cemetery when I bury her ashes,” I said.</p><p>“I will,” he told me, taking my hand again, “I’ll go with you.”</p><p>“I want to be a good daughter,” I said, feeling my throat tighten again, not sure why I was mentioning this. “I always wanted that.”</p><p>Michael put his arm around my shoulder. “She always said you were,” he told me. “She wished you knew. She’d want you to know now.”</p><p>I let myself lean my head against him as his arm drew me in. I waited to cry, because I felt like it was about to happen, but it didn’t.</p><p>“I know you came up hard,” he said with compassion, “after it happened. When you had to live all those different places. Like your mother.” I nodded, the movements of my head against his shoulder answer enough. “But are you in a better place now?”</p><p>I took a moment to answer- to collect myself, not because I didn’t have an answer. “I am,” I said, “I think coming here is helping me to do that.”</p><p>“She told me in the beginning of that year,” Michael said, and I knew he meant the last year she was alive, “she was rethinking her job and you were having a hard time. She was thinking of coming here for the summer, maybe moving. Not necessarily moving here, but somewhere else. She wasn’t sure. But she said, she knew she’d figure something out. I asked her, weren’t the two of you so used to being in New York? And she said to me, yes, but sometimes you just need to have perspective about things like that. She said you were her home, not New York, and maybe the both of you could find something else.”</p><p>“Oh,” I said quietly. My eyes felt like they were about to overflow, like dewdrops slipping down grass in the morning. “I’ve thought about a lot of things like that lately.” I lifted my left hand a little so I wouldn’t seem like my whole existence was as miserable as I may have been presenting. “I’m married now,” I said. “And I’m happy where I’m living.” I gave a little smile. “I’m telling the truth. Don’t worry.”</p><p>“Good,” he said to me, smiling with his mouth closed a little. Almost immediately after, he said “I have something to give you.” I wasn’t sure how to respond, but he got up and went down the hallway and opened the door to another room and after a few minutes came out with a small piece of paper. “She sent this to me when we were sixteen, seventeen.” He handed it to me. “I think you should have it now.”</p><p>It was a postcard, with a photograph of what appeared to be a main street. <em>Tahlequah, OK, </em>it was captioned. I turned it over, slowly, like if I moved too quickly something bad would happen. <em>ᎣᏏᏲ</em>, my mother’s handwriting began. I thought it meant hello because that made the most sense to me. I wasn’t sure. My mother wasn’t fluent in Tsalagi, but always said she’d like for the both of us to be. <em>I’m finally out of her house! </em>I smiled, hearing it in my mother’s voice, my mother at the age of some of my students, young but having been aged by suffering, ready to be free, live her own life and try to be happy. <em>So I’m taking the buses until I get to New York. Today I got to Oklahoma, but by the time this gets to you, I’ll probably be far from there. I wonder where I’ll be then? </em>I remembered thinking of my mother as always out of reach after she died, in my dreams, I could see glimpses of her but never get close, she was always going away, where I did not know. <em>It’s exciting so far. Sometimes I just like to look out the window and see everything go by. And I’ve only traveled this much so far. I hope you’re doing fine and school isn’t too bad. I barely remember school. When I can get to a pay phone I’ll call you and you can tell me everything I’ve missed lately. I’m sure it’s a lot. I have a lot to tell you too. – Audrey, </em>she signed, her handwriting small to fit it all on the message half of the postcard. On the other side she’d written her name and what I supposed was the address of the Oklahoma post office she’d gotten the card from. Audrey Youngbird, she’d written in the handwriting I’d know if I had to choose it out of a hundred samples.</p><p>“Thank you, Michael,” I said, almost too taken aback to respond for a moment. “Thank you so much,” my voice coming out like breaths. I shook my head. “I wish it hadn’t taken us so long to meet.”</p><p>“So do I,” he said, his voice tinged both with sadness and peace, “but we’re here now, aren’t we?” He smiled at me, like it was all going to be all right, and I thought, in the moment, he could be right about that.</p><p>_</p><p>I ended up staying so late at Michael’s house that I had dinner there and didn’t leave until past midnight, and had to reassure him that I felt safe driving back to the motel alone at that hour. Even after all the dangerous things in my life I’d done that I’d told him about (not the ones in Amsterdam, though), he still was concerned enough about me to ask. I lay back on my bed with my clothes on, staring at the postcard, turning it back and forth like a kaleidoscope to see it from all angles. I thought of myself leaving Vegas, traveling across the country on a bus, seeing different towns, coasting away on different highways and roads, big cities and the most rural towns, right beside me, only the window separating me from the rest of the world. Just as my mother had left her aunt’s home. After a while, we’d realized we couldn’t live with others dictating our lives, even if it meant taking a risk and leaving. It wasn’t just that I was more like my mother than I used to think, but that maybe once, she’d been like how I used to be. I’d seen her as so brave for doing things that I’d felt I was doing wrong. I regretted the past, but now, I just felt like I understood her better. Like I understood myself better.</p><p>Eventually that night, I fell asleep.</p><p>Most of the days between the day before and the day I was meant to go to the cemetery, I spent at Michael’s house. I didn’t want him to have to come to meet me at the motel, I would have felt strange for asking that. The first time I called before, the next few times, I came unannounced, even though he said I was always welcome, I always thought maybe he wouldn’t be there and I wouldn’t seem rude, and then when he inevitably was there, I didn’t feel so insecure and lost once the door opened. I think he stayed because he knew I’d be coming even if I didn’t say. I wasn’t going to be there for much longer, we both knew.</p><p>I told him things about my mother, her and I. Things I’d remembered recently from the journals, things I’d never bothered to say. Things about New York in my youth- why I loved it, even though I was never really happy as a child unless I was with my mother. I told him about the Barbours, both of the regrettable times I’d lived with them, and their stories, and my story of how I ended up with them both times. I told him about Welty, and Philip, and the museum, and what we shared that kept us tied across the ocean, even if it wasn’t in the way I’d once thought we should have been. I told him about Las Vegas, and my father and Xandra, and Kotku, and Slava. I told him more about her than I thought I would. I told him about Hobie, and how I still felt like I was trying to make things right.  I told him about getting married. I told him, without going into details about where I was and what I’d been doing, that I tried to kill myself by overdosing, and right when I was about to die, I saw my mother, and I lived. And I assured him I didn’t do drugs anymore. Too many people die that way, he told me. I know, I’d said.</p><p>He told me of his own life, day by day. Every once in a while I realized I wasn’t surprised or confused at his trusting me, his confiding in me. How he lost his father at a young age, too. How his mother was alive still, and he had brothers and sisters, and nieces and nephews all around the lower Midwest. But he’d never been married or had any children, although he didn’t regret that- he had a family, he said. He had many friends, and was living his life, and doing all right. How he'd started writing and photography because he wanted to create his own records of what he'd seen, what he'd lived.</p><p>Part of me wondered, if I’d known Michael, would I have gone to him instead of Hobie when my father died. As soon as the thought came to me I bit my lips guiltily, but all things considered, it wasn’t such an illogical thing to ask of myself. But it was only a hypothetical question. I’d never met him until this week. When my mother was alive, I’d lived in fear every day she’d never come home, but I also couldn’t conceive of ever seeing anyone else as family. I’d sometimes wondered if she’d only stayed with my father for as long as she did for my sake. Now, I wondered if she stayed in New York for as long as she did for my sake. The way I saw New York, the New York of my childhood, was inseparable from my memory of her.</p><p>I thought then that maybe I had been the one who stayed in New York, thinking consciously or not I was staying on her behalf, after she died.</p><p>The day before I buried my mother I knocked on Michael’s door. My coat was unbuttoned, and it was over forty degrees, pretty warm for a December morning in Kansas. “Theo,” he said to me, “good morning. You’re earlier than usual,” he said, with no judgment, just observation as he opened the door for me to come in. I looked towards his gray pickup truck.</p><p>“Take me to where her house was,” I asked, not coming in, “please”. I saw Michael close his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them, he reached to the side of the door inside his house, where his coat was hanging.</p><p>“I was waiting for you to ask,” he said to me, “if you didn’t, I was going to offer. But, I thought you would,” he said, raising his eyebrows. I smiled a little.       </p><p>I wanted to thank him. I thought I’d never be able to thank him enough. But over the past few days, I’d kept saying thank you to him, that I didn’t know how I could ever make up for all he’d done, and he kept telling me that I didn’t have to act like I was in debt to him, that I hadn’t made him do anything he didn’t want to, that this was as good for him as it was good for me.</p><p>I felt myself walking quickly to the car, and realizing I’d made a good choice by wearing winter boots instead of heels when I had to climb up into the truck’s passenger seat. When I exhaled, I saw my breath come out. I remembered exhaling onto the buses from Vegas and putting my handprint in the window.</p><p>“You’re still young. Enjoy being able to jump up so fast,” he said to me, and I laughed a little.</p><p>“I’ve never really felt young,” I told him, shrugging.</p><p>He looked over to me, putting the keys in the ignition but not yet driving away. “You are,” he said, “you’ve just been through a lot.” I thought about that for a moment. “You know, after your mother died, I spent a lot of time thinking about what your life might have been like. The two of you were harmed young, and you had to make choices for your own sake, when other people had made choices for you that they didn’t have a right to.” I nodded, reflecting on this. “But you both turned out okay,” he said. “No one could tell either of you who you were, tell you how to live. That was up to you.”</p><p>I was quiet, just thinking about what he said. I didn’t want to say I wished we’d known each other earlier, I didn’t want to talk about how I wished the past could have gone, or what I regretted. I rolled down my window, and looked out when I realized Michael was slowing down.</p><p>“There,” he said.</p><p>The house was still there, although the paint had faded and thinned to a battered pale blue. The front door was closed, and seemed to have been recently painted white. No one seemed to be home. The windows were all closed. I wondered which one had been my mother’s bedroom window, which one she looked out of. But then, it had been the house she lived in-she would have looked out all of them. In the distance, I could, in fact, see the lake. “We can stay however long you need,” Michael told me. We stepped out of the car and stood there for a few minutes, with his hand on my shoulder. I looked at every detail of the house, of its surroundings. I closed my eyes and could hear the gentle rush of wintry breezes flowing by, the calls of cardinals or doves, and in the distance, geese. People yelling, or talking loudly, on this street or nearby, the words hard to make out. The sound of a car driving over a pothole.</p><p>“Are you okay?” he asked me.</p><p>“I think,” I said, opening my eyes, “yeah, I think I am.”</p><p>_</p><p>Michael insisted driving me to the cemetery the next day. “It’s not that I don’t trust you to drive, but you never know what you’re dealing with when you have a rental,” he told me, and I took as helpful advice since I wasn’t too much of an experienced driver with rentals anyway, even with my year of traveling. By then, it was agreed upon, unspoken, that we’d be going together anyway. His pants and jacket were both black. I didn’t ask if it was purposeful. My coat was black, and my dress was a dark gray, which I figured was close enough to mourning clothes.</p><p>When we arrived at the cemetery, we were early, and had to wait for the cemetery worker to show up and bury the urn. Three feet, not six, but she’d be right with her parents all the same, and I was aware from my transactions and discussions with the cemetery over the phone that her name was already carved on the headstone.</p><p>“Are you religious?” Michael asked me, not pryingly, but because I’d told him I’d just chosen a simple ceremony.</p><p>“I don’t know,” I answered quietly, realizing I had no answer to that question, wasn't sure how to evaluate my beliefs. I’d never really followed my father’s beliefs in astrology and fortune, and as for my mother, she hadn’t specifically raised me to be against any belief system in particular. But when I was little and asked her what religion she was- probably, people were talking about religion at school- she looked at me for a long time and told me, she didn’t have an easy answer to that, and one day she might be able to explain it to me. Even though, by now, I knew some of what she must have been thinking, I wished she could have explained to me in her own words what she felt, what she believed, what she didn’t. What her parents taught her, what her aunt told her was wrong, what she did and didn’t want me to believe.  </p><p>I was following him through the cemetery, because he knew where the headstone was. He’d been there when it was interred. He was there for my mother for both the funerals. “I know it’s a lot different. But I visited my father’s grave recently. I didn’t pray. But…I think I left feeling better. Like it finally felt like I’d really left that part of my life behind. I felt…at peace, I guess.” I was holding my mother’s urn close to me, feeling the cool metal on my skin through my clothes. I stopped, and held it closer, tighter, for a long moment. I didn’t expect it, but he embraced me then, both his arms around me, like he was dragging me out of some hole. I leaned my head against his shoulder for a moment.</p><p>And when the moment was over I looked up, and he let go of me, and I kept walking. “I didn’t do this for so long. I mean, for a while I wouldn’t have been able to. But…I think I was afraid to really let her go. But I don’t think I’m doing that. I don’t think laying her to rest is getting rid of her. I think it’s maybe the opposite,” I said, trying to word it aloud in a way that aligned with how I was feeling.</p><p>“Hey,” he told me. “You don’t have to worry about that.”</p><p>“I know now,” I said, “but I used to.”</p><p>“I used to think about things in ways I didn’t need to,” he told me. “You’re not the only one,” he said, as if to tell me I wasn’t alone in my past ways, at least some of them.</p><p>When we got to the stone, I saw the front of it first. A gray granite headstone with the name Youngbird emblazoned on it. I looked at it for the first time in my life, almost breathless. It was under an evergreen tree with ice coating its fingertip-sized pinecones, and near a few other stones. I walked to the other side, where it said, THEODORE, 1944-1983, and CAROLINE, 1945-1984. And, underneath, clearly a new addition to the stone: AUDREY, 1968-2003. My father’s name was nowhere on it. It was just my mother and her family.</p><p>“When I was around your age,” Michael said to me, “I had to bury my father. Heart attack. He was young, too.” We were both quiet for a moment. “It’s never easy. If it’s hard, it doesn’t mean you’ve done anything wrong.” I didn’t know how to answer so I just took his hand, feeling his warm, calloused palm against mine – in my haste this morning at the motel I’d forgotten to bring my gloves, which had made my hands stiff with the cold, when I got around to noticing.</p><p>The cemetery worker arrived on time- I checked my phone as soon as I saw him walking towards us, in the distance, not wanting to check right in front of him. When he came, nothing he said made much of an impression on me. I was barely paying attention to him. I handed him the urn, and kept my eyes on it, as the hole was dug, as he lowered my mother down to rest aside my grandparents. At some point I found myself grabbing onto Michael’s wrist like I was lost, but he took my hand in his.</p><p>It was not snowing, but some old snowflakes fell from the evergreen tree when the wind blew, and fell like sparkling powder on my face. I let myself take it in- the cool feel of the snow on my skin, the smell of the pine needles, the sound of the wind going through the branches, pushing at me as if it was making sure I wouldn’t fall down even if it blew hard. The man who worked at the cemetery was saying something, but I couldn’t have told you what. Michael was taking care of something, thanking the man as he left – I’d already paid for the service before I came. I was crying quietly and it came hot from my eyes but within moments turned cold on my face.</p><p>I wondered then if the rest of my life would be like this- coming to a point where I would say to myself, I finally got around to doing this, and now I must make peace with the rest of my past. And with each day there would be more behind me to make sense of and come to terms with. And maybe there would be. But, I thought, I could do it now.</p><p>Michael and I stayed where we were for a while. We laid down a garland of pink roses by the stone. “People usually say something but I don’t know what to say,” I told Michael.</p><p>“We don’t have to speak out loud,” he told me reassuringly. “We can just think of what we’d say. Whatever it is, if she didn’t know when she was alive, I think she’ll know now.”  I nodded slowly like I’d finally understood something he was trying to explain. And so we stood there, and thought of what we wanted to say to my mother, what we would say to her, what we were saying to her even if we couldn’t tell her in person out loud.</p><p>He put his arm around me after a while. “<em>Nasgi winigalisda</em>,” he said, looking me in the eye, “amen.” I wanted to repeat after him, but the words wouldn’t come to my mouth, and I just took both his hands in mine. I clasped onto him like I would never be able to let go. The wind blew dots of snow from the branches onto our hands like we’d dipped ourselves in crystals. I felt that something had just shifted, that I’d ended one thing and began another at the same time, and I was crying, because sometimes that was the only way I could manage to respond to having so much inside of me. I bent my head and drew my hands against my forehead and Michael let me stay that way for a few minutes, until I stopped crying. I smiled a little at him, so he’d know I was all right. I was. Because my mother had lived a whole life of her own, and no one could take that from her, and I survived, and I knew my mother would have been satisfied to know I’d come this far, that I’d managed to bring her back to my family, to bring myself to my family.</p><p>“Yes,” I told Michael, with my face wet and my eyes drying, “yes.”</p><p>_</p><p>“I feel bad about leaving,” I said, looking into a mug of green tea while sitting on Michael’s couch that night. “I just came and now…”</p><p>“I know,” he told me. “You don’t have to feel bad, but I understand. And you’re always welcome to come here.” It didn’t surprise me that he said so, but it overwhelmed me all the same. I took a deep breath.</p><p>“Okay,” I said, “I mean. Thank you.” I drank some of the tea. “I’m sorry if this is a strange question but do you ever worry that you’ll forget important things?” I sniffed a little.</p><p>“I take it this is something you worry about, Theo?” Michael asked me, and I quietly said, yeah, I guess, which I suppose was one of the bigger understatements to ever come from me. “Well. Sometimes even if you think you have trouble remembering something, there are times when you realize you didn’t forget it after all. It just wasn’t in the front of your mind for a while. If it’s important, you probably won’t be able to forget it. At least, that’s my experience.”</p><p>“That makes sense,” I said. “I think I’m just used to worrying about a lot of things. Even if they don’t happen as much as they used to anymore.”</p><p>“It doubt it will be that way forever,” he told me. “Maybe it will never be perfect. But your life is different now, and you know that, and one day you’ll be more used to it.” I absorbed this solemnly- maybe I hadn’t been as consistently used to my new life as I thought I’d been, as I thought I should be. It sometimes felt too good to be true, like I had to be constantly fearing it would all turn to ash. I was doing all right, but sometimes I still didn’t feel like I knew how to be all right.</p><p>“We have to stay in contact,” I told him. This time, I wouldn’t stop answering, I told myself. “However you want to do it.” So we took a few minutes exchanging addresses and emails and phone numbers.</p><p>I leaned back into the couch, putting my empty mug on the table. “Be careful,” I said dryly, “I have a way of sticking in people’s lives.”</p><p>“Good,” he told me, half-smiling, “more people should do that.” I could see the moon, rounded and silver, from the window.</p><p>“Michael,” I said tenuously.</p><p>“Are you all right?” he asked.</p><p>“Yes, I’m fine,” I said, putting a hand to my forehead. “I’ve just realized something really important.” I realized he was waiting for me to say what it was, so I swallowed hard. “I think I … I want to get my last name legally changed. To my mother’s. I know I’ll probably have to go in a courtroom or something to do it but…fuck it. I’ll do it.” I exhaled unevenly, wondering if I looked like I was about to break down.</p><p>“Theo Youngbird,” he said to me, letting me hear it. “Audrey Youngbird’s daughter.”</p><p>“That’s me,” I said, and he didn’t have to reassure me that I wouldn’t forget it, because I realized then I knew who I was more than I ever had before.</p><p>_</p><p>I stayed late into the night at Michael’s house but had to leave eventually to get ready for my flight in the morning. I was emotional when I left, but I didn’t cry until I was out of his house. I knew it wasn’t as if we would never hear from each other again or that we could never see each other again, but leaving so soon after everything we’d been through together felt too abrupt, like I was supposed to be there for longer. But I could come back, I knew, it wasn’t all over- things didn’t always have to be like that.</p><p>In the hotel I could hear the same person next to me talking on his phone loudly enough to be heard through the wall, but his exact words were still obscured.  I picked up my cell phone and dialed Slava’s cell phone, in case she wasn’t at the house. It rang a few times, and when it stopped ringing, I immediately asked, “Slava? Are you there?” I hadn’t taken account that I sounded a bit frantic and it was likely evident I’d been crying.</p><p>“Theo? Hey? Are you okay?” she asked me, her voice full of concern. “What time is it there? Did something happen to you?”</p><p>I sniffled a little. “I’m fine,” I said, probably not sounding that fine. “I just wanted to call you and tell you I’m coming home tomorrow. I’ll probably be back in the late afternoon or evening.”</p><p>“Yes,” she said, “I knew that. Do not worry, I did not forget. How did it all go? You must tell me. But you can wait until tomorrow, I know you probably want to get ready and go to sleep and not talk about it all on the phone.” She knew me so well, I thought.</p><p>“Yeah,” I said. “Okay. I love you.” Slava was quiet for a moment as if she hadn’t expected me to say that, so plainly, as if it was a commonplace statement. She probably hadn’t expected it- it wasn’t as if I said it too often under normal circumstances, when I wasn’t extremely happy, or crying so hard my face hurt. Sometimes I still felt self conscious about saying it. I didn’t want to be that way still, but I was, even if it wasn’t as bad as it had been years ago.</p><p>I could hear Slava breathing into the receiver. “I love you too,” she said, her voice warm and low, her accent rendering the vowels almost poetic. I inhaled, trying to think of what to say next.</p><p>“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said breathlessly.</p><p>“Cannot wait,” Slava told me. “Now get your sleep. I looked up what time it is in Kansas, very late.”</p><p>“But you’re an hour ahead,” I said, “and you’re up.” She laughed.</p><p>“Of course I am,” she told me, “I am always up.”</p><p>“Okay,” I said, laughing. “well, it was nice to hear your voice.”</p><p>“I missed you too,” she told me, “moya zhena.”</p><p>_</p><p>That last night in Kansas I dreamed of my mother. I was a child again, riding the bus with Popchyk and my wrapped-up textbook I still thought was the painting. I was looking out the window, and I was going through a town I hadn’t been to, but it was how I recognized the area around my great-aunt’s house even though I’d never been there, I knew where I was. I was leaving the neighborhood. I turned my head to the left, and on the bus seat opposite me, my mother was sitting alone. She was only a few years older than me, maybe seventeen, and she had straight posture and an old backpack on her lap, and her clothes looked like they were from the 80s. She locked eyes with me and smiled at me. I smiled back. She waved, and I saw out from the window on her side, a sign that said we were leaving some town or another. “What stop did you get on?” she asked me.</p><p>“The same one as you,” I said.  </p><p>“Where are you going?” she asked me with interest.</p><p>“Home,” I said.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. New York</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Part IV: New York</p><p>
  <em>“The truth is I've never fooled anyone. I've let men sometimes fool themselves. Men sometimes didn’t bother to find out who and what I was. Instead they would invent a character for me. I wouldn't argue with them. They were obviously loving somebody I wasn't.”</em>
</p><p>-<em>My Story</em>, Marilyn Monroe</p><p>
  <em>“History will always find you, and wrap you</em>
</p><p>
  <em>In its thousand arms.”</em>
</p><p>-“Break My Heart,” Joy Harjo</p><p>I made my way out of the chaotic, cavernous Logan Airport in the late afternoon and stepped into a misty, gray winter day in Boston. It hadn’t snowed, and I wasn’t sure if it was going to, but it was dark enough that it was certainly possible. I got on the bus, and saw greenish-blue metallic skyscrapers with fog obscuring the tops of them, like something from a science fiction movie. The roads had so many potholes there were times it felt like how I imagined riding a horse-driven carriage over cobblestones must have felt. Eventually, I was out of the city, and the bus kept going eastward, until I got to the Hyannis Transportation Center, which took me back to the station in Mashpee, where I’d parked my car before I took the trip.</p><p>The car was so cold inside I was almost surprised, but I didn’t mind it that much. It was almost invigorating after hours of being on heated buses. I took out my phone, which had lost some of its charge but wasn’t dead and would hang in there until I got home, and dialed Slava’s cell number, the screen of my phone lighting my way in the dark, since it was now nighttime.</p><p>“Hey,” I said, softly, when the line stopped ringing. “It’s me.”</p><p>“Wonderful to hear from you! I hope your trip went safely. You are speaking very softly. Is there trouble with your connection?” Slava asked me. I spoke before she could go on one of her rants about over-reliance on technology or the issues with infrastructure in America.</p><p>“No,” I said, “I was just quiet. Everything was safe. It was…” I took a deep breath, trying to find the words, knowing I wasn’t sure how I’d ever put it all into words. “I would regret not going sooner, but I needed to go, and now was as right of a time to do it as ever. It…helped me a lot.” My voice sounded stilted, and I paused. “We can talk about it later. I’ll come home now. I’m almost there, I just have to drive back from the Commons.”</p><p>“Okay,” she said. “Now that you are on vacation from work, we should go to visit New York soon. Only a few days if you want.”</p><p>“Yeah,” I said, “I think that would be good. I think we should go. I told Hobie we would.”</p><p>“I should not keep you on the line for so long,” Slava told me. “It is late and you are probably tired, and you have to drive. I will be waiting for you,” she told me, her voice earnest, but tinged with roguishness.</p><p>“I know,” I said. “I’ll be back soon. And if you don’t mind being up late, I’ll tell you everything.”</p><p>“Of course,” said Slava. “Tell me everything you want to.”</p><p>_</p><p>By the time I started parking outside of the house, I could see Slava walking past a front window to open the door for me, and when I came to the doorway, she immediately grabbed my face to kiss me on both cheeks and then my mouth. I wrapped my arms around her wordlessly and clung to her so hard I was almost afraid I was constricting her, but she didn’t complain.</p><p>“I had a nice time seeing this town this week, but I missed you,” she said, smiling. “I suppose we missed each other. It is a good thing we reconnected, then, right? We do not really have a present without the past.”</p><p>“It’s a good thing sometimes,” I told her, trying to breathe steadily. “I- I know I’m not going to forget. But I feel like I have to tell it to you now anyway or else it won’t be the same, somehow, if that makes sense?”</p><p>“Maybe you can write it down too,” Slava suggested, “use one of your work notebooks. Your notebooks were always so helpful.”</p><p>“Wow,” I said, taken aback, “I wasn’t even thinking about that. I think I’ll do that later.” I took a deep breath. “How about,” I said, “I’ll tell you about what happened. And then you can tell me anything you like. Your past week, anything.”</p><p>Slava looked me in the eye, like she was ready for anything I could tell her, like she would never stop listening. “That is a good deal, Theodora,” she said solemnly, taking my hand. “Now. Come out of the doorway, so we can have a better time of it.”</p><p>_</p><p>It must have been hours before I stopped talking. We’d gone from sitting at the table drinking black tea (although Slava put some vodka in hers), to the couch, then to sitting down facing each other on the bed. I knew, despite that I hadn’t checked the time, it had to be technically the early morning. I was half-laying in bed, sort of sitting up, Slava’s arms supporting me. “That’s not it, though,” I told her softly, after I’d told her mostly everything. Her eyes were glistening. I would have told her it was all right for her to cry, but I knew she wasn’t going to, and that somehow, it was for me that she restrained herself. I thought, she probably did not want to seem sad, because the story I told wasn’t just one of sadness, not anymore.</p><p>“What else,” Slava said, not really asking. Her voice was quiet, almost as quiet as my voice had become, raw from speaking for so many hours on end when I was unused to doing so. “You can say anything,” she reassured me.</p><p>I smiled a little, looking down. “Well,” I said, “maybe I’m getting ahead of myself, because I barely know how the process works at all, least of all in this state. But…” I inhaled, looking right at her. “I’m going to take my mother’s last name. Youngbird.” I was quiet for a moment after that. I think, when I was younger, and my father had just left us, I was waiting for everyone to start calling my mother by her name. But It was my name too.</p><p>“It is a beautiful name, Theodora,” Slava told me, taking one of my hands like we were making some kind of oath. “I am happy for you. This past week, I keep thinking to myself- I am not worried about you. I think you are doing well. And I was right.” She gave a crooked half smile. “In recent years, you know what I mean, I was worried I would not live to see this for you. But I am glad to be here to see you as you should be. Free.” My eyes were overflowing, and she rubbed at my face with the bedsheets.</p><p>“Do not be sad. Ah, I did not mean for this,” Slava said.</p><p>“No,” I said, trying to keep it together. “I’m not sad. It’s just…” I wiped my nose with my sleeve, holding back a sob I did not want to let out. “There were times I didn’t think I’d be here either, but you know that.” I took a minute to compose myself. “I think I should go to bed soon if I don’t want to wake up at two in the afternoon,” I tried to say with dry humor, but I’m not sure if I was effective. “I’m tired. I suppose we can sleep in tomorrow since I don’t have work and- wait, do you have anything tomorrow?”</p><p>She gave me a mysterious look, smiling with her mouth closed. “No. But I might have news. It can wait, though. We will rest tomorrow, and maybe plan for New York, how about it?”</p><p>I took a deep breath, calming myself. “Yeah,” I said, smiling weakly, “I was going to say the same thing.” </p><p>“Good night, Princess,” Slava said to me, turning off the light.</p><p>“Hey,” I said half-heartedly, “I wasn’t even dressed for bed yet?”</p><p>In the shadows I could make out her frame, her shoulders shrugging. “Just take the clothes off. The comforter is warm like fur,” she said, yawning like a cat, “and the house is warm.” I sighed.</p><p>“Sure,” I said, feeling like I was breaking some kind of rule, but unclothing myself anyway, and getting under the thick covers, letting myself be held as we fell asleep. “Good night, Slava.”</p><p>_</p><p>When I woke up late the next morning, I was alone in my bed, and I saw that Slava had lain out a thick, warm bathrobe at the foot of my bed for me to put on once I got up, given that even though we were in the warmth of the house it was still winter, and Slava valued staying warm. She was more thoughtful than people would assume based on first impressions. Although after a few minutes I realized the sound from the other room wasn’t the TV being played on low volume, but Slava speaking on the phone. As I got ready for the day ahead of me, choosing clothes to wear, the conversation seemed to end. I walked into the living room with my bathrobe tied shut and some warm socks on my feet.</p><p>“So,” I asked Slava, who was dressed by then- I saw on the clock it was past ten-thirty – “what’s your news?” I hoped I didn’t sound judgmental, but then again, since I’d just woken up I probably sounded more spaced-out than anything.</p><p>She smiled widely. “I bought a nightclub,” she said, which surprised me more than it should have given just weeks ago she’d mentioned wanting to go into club management and do some work again. “In Boston. It is a great building and I have great ideas for it, maybe opening in spring- what is wrong?”</p><p>I hadn’t realized it was clear on my face, but I was worried, and not about the legitimacy of her business. “You’re not…leaving me,” I said tentatively. Slava was quiet for a moment.</p><p>She walked towards me, her uncombed hair laying over her shoulder like a wild waterfall at night. “No,” she said reassuringly, “no, of course not!” she put her hand on my shoulder. “Do not ever worry about that. I am not going anywhere.” She smiled a little. I looked up, already feeling like I had overreacted for no reason, although I was glad I didn’t react further, as I probably would have if she hadn’t spoken so quickly. “After all this I will not be gotten rid of so easy, you know?” I tried to laugh along with her, to show I felt reassured, because I knew she was telling the truth. But it was still so hard to wrap my head around, how we were living- it felt like we were doing something that was never meant for us to do, sometimes. “But no, I am not leaving at all. I am the owner, do not have to be there all the time. It does not open for months, I will have people working for me. But maybe you will like to come one night when it does open? I have great ambitions for it,” she said emphatically.</p><p>“All right,” I said, “I’ll tolerate a night in that city if it’s with you.” I smiled at her to show I was all right, I was happy, and I supported her. Because all of that was true, and I just had to remind myself I believed it sometimes, and I hoped she believed it too.  </p><p>“It will be an incredible opening night! I can already envision it. And I would not be at this point without you!” She was waving her arms around. I vaguely remembered an old dress in the back of my closet, gifted to me from a coworker when I briefly worked at the fashion magazine, a trendy number made to look like it was comprised of caution tape. “It will have nights that will make New York look like a little seaside village. Did you see some news poll named Massachusetts best state in America this year?” I was laughing a little, though not at her. She looked point blank at me. “You will probably have to help with music and such. I know there will be DJ’s but they will have to follow the guidelines, you see? And furniture, you will know more about this than me, what would work for the club. Although we will not be getting antiques.”</p><p>“No,” I agreed, “I think new items are probably best.” Inwardly I was thinking how in the world I would be able to help with contemporary pieces for a nightclub, but I supposed if the two of us worked on something together, it would get worked out eventually, just with a lot of potholes on the road.</p><p>“Good,” Slava said brightly, raising a pen up in the air and pointing it towards me, like some bizarre illustration of a fairy with a wand. “Being together was the best idea we ever came up with together. And to think we already decided on it so many years ago!” I was silent for a moment.</p><p>“Wait. What?” I asked, trying to process what she’d just said.</p><p>“I just mean that, if we had been given more choices, better lots in life, we would have never left one another, we would never have had to. And we knew this! You said it to me so many times. And I said it back, in my own way or in actions, even when I knew you did not remember.” She shrugged. “But the universe gave us another chance,” she added philosophically, “and we both know you must take every chance you get, when they are not given out so easily.” We took what we have, I wanted to say, even if it wasn’t stolen, we dragged it out of the grip of fate anyway and made it our own.</p><p>“Oh,” I said, unsure of how to respond. “I see.” I sighed. “Well, I didn’t forget everything. I always felt like that even during the day. And…I wish I hadn’t hated myself too much to see that you thought the same.” Slava took my wrist, led me to the couch so we could sit together. “I hated myself so much I would have lived any lie possible because I didn’t think I deserved any better,” my voice was faraway as I reevaluated how things used to be.</p><p>“But you realized you did,” Slava told me. “And you know there is nothing wrong with who you are.”</p><p>“No,” I said, exhaling like it was the first time I’d ever done it, staring at Slava in a way that probably made my eyes look too wide and frantic. “I think…I’m really getting to be who I’m supposed to be now.” My mother’s – my – last name rang through my head. “And- I’m okay with that. It’s…it doesn’t feel bad anymore.”</p><p>Slava smiled at me broadly then for a moment, saying nothing. Then she spoke. “Well. I have never known much about what I was supposed to do. But I will tell you, Princess…things do not feel so bad for me anymore, either.” I took her hand and just stayed there for a while. After a few moments, I heard Slava again.</p><p>“Hey,” she asked, “when did you want to go to New York?”</p><p>_</p><p>That morning, we’d called Hobie and agreed to come to his place later in the week, saying I’d drive the way there. I wasn’t anticipating driving at all, but if we timed it right, it probably wouldn’t take as long as going by train, and we wouldn’t have to be waiting around in a station for the train to come and possibly be delayed- especially given that it was the holiday season. Which was why we’d chosen to go on Wednesday night, or technically Thursday morning, rather than the weekend, which would undoubtedly see a large wave of tourists. It was the same everywhere tourists went- I’d learned that this summer in Mashpee, that tourists loved to visit Cape Cod in the summer, especially on the weekends. One late Saturday in August, I’d learned to choose wiser when driving anywhere near the bridge- the sight of an unbroken, almost still, endless line of cars over and beyond the bridge by the Christmas Tree Shop with its windmill that looked like something out of an old Dutch painting, was representative of how things were on the weekends.</p><p>I was no longer a tourist here- but, I wasn’t a tourist to New York either, even though I couldn’t exactly say it was my home anymore. If someone asked me if I was a local here, I’d maybe say, “kind of”. If I was in New York and someone asked me if I was from there, what would I say? “I used to be?” There were so many basic questions about my life that couldn’t be answered quickly, and if they were, they were evidence of long, convoluted stories. That was what my life was. It didn’t have to be an entirely bad thing- but it was complicated, to say the least, and not something everyone could understand.</p><p>But now, I had people in my life who did understand, and so it really didn’t have to be such a bad thing, to be who I was. </p><p>I thought of all this as I drove back from an antique store in a nearby town, where I’d bought Hobie’s gift, an elaborate sailor’s valentine with white and purple shells surrounding a Ralph Cahoon print of some mermaids riding a whale. Two different parts of the past put together, at one point the joining of the new and the antique, but now it was all old, all history. Maybe one day the frauds I’d created would be seen that way by some. But I didn’t think about them so much anymore. I thought Hobie would be interested to hear of all the local folk art in stores and in small museums, the scrimshaw and shellwork and oil paintings of flame-colored New England woods and greenish maritime scenes. While at a stop light, I noticed it was probably a good idea to go to the gas station, so I decided to make a detour there before I went home.</p><p>After getting my tank filled up, I decided I may as well go into the shop and get a map, since I realized I didn’t have one at home. I’d made the trip before, and it’s not like I couldn’t use my phone, but it would be good to have. Especially if I went through areas with no reception, or got too distracted by Slava to navigate any relatively unfamiliar roads from point A to point B. Inside the store, I noticed someone familiar out of the corner of my eye. I hadn’t seen any of my students in a while, I realized- but I’d been thinking of them. There was Victor, wearing an opened gray parka and a knit hat with hiking boots, one of which seemed to be unlaced, but I wasn’t sure if he didn’t know or if that was the style among kids these days.</p><p>“Victor,” I said, and he turned his head around, looking back from the sodas he’d been deciding over, taking a can of A&amp;W. “I hope you’ve been having a nice vacation.”</p><p>“Yeah,” he said, like he was surprised to see me. “Thanks for not giving homework,” he said, smiling a little, like I was in on some kind of inside joke. “Um. I hope you’re doing well, Miss Decker,” he asked more seriously, like he had genuine concerns about how I might be doing.</p><p>I laughed nervously. “Oh. Actually, things have been great lately. Although now that you reminded me. Pretty soon I might be going by a new name so I won’t be Miss Decker anymore.”</p><p>“Because you got married?” he asked quizzically, probably wondering why I didn’t just take the name when I got married like most people do in the first place rather than waiting- I’d never announced it officially in class but there was no hiding the ring and word traveled anyway. It wasn’t that I was hiding anything. Maybe next term I would say something. I’d have to explain my name change, after all.</p><p>I sighed. “Well, no actually. I…am taking my mother’s name, rather than my father’s. Which might sound strange to do now, and it was a recent decision, but I suppose it was a long time coming.” I wondered if it was strange for me to be telling one of my students this out of school in a gas station convenience store, if this was somehow against any rules or conventions, or if I was really just a fucked-up stagnated adult who’d chosen to be a teacher because I couldn’t get over the mistakes I’d made when I was my students’ age and felt like I had to compensate for something rather than help and educate. So I looked at him closely. “I…was planning to make an announcement about it when we come back from vacation, but for now I guess it can wait.” I sighed. “I hope this wasn’t too strange for you. Because let me tell you, I know what it’s like to have some strange school faculty bothering you…. And really, I hope your vacation is going well, and you’re doing fine.” I tried to smile normally while reaching into my coat pocket for some money to pay for the map. Victor was always quiet in class, seeming reserved even if I saw him with friends- maybe it was something familiar or maybe I just worried too much, but I hoped he was all right. I hoped they all were. I hoped none of them would be like me.</p><p>He nodded at me, reassuringly, quiet for a moment. “You worry about us a lot, don’t you?” he asked. “I’m not saying that’s bad. I’m just asking.”</p><p>“Yeah,” I said, and when I thought about it, I supposed I wasn’t surprised that what I felt was so plainly open that a high school kid could figure it out with no difficulty, “yeah, Victor, I do.” I shrugged.</p><p>“I’m fine,” he told me, smiling a little. “But I get it.” He looked at me, his dark eyes full of understanding. “Did you have a hard time when you were our age? Sorry if that’s…not okay to ask….” He trailed off.</p><p>I inhaled. “It was bad,” I said, shaking my head. I don’t want any of you to suffer, I thought, I don’t want any of you to see what I’ve seen, done what I’ve done. But I knew that kids did have their struggles, some of which may have looked like some of mine, and maybe a few of my students would. I couldn’t shield them from the world. And that wasn’t what I’d been attempting by teaching them. I tried to smile and make it look natural. “But….I have a lot of faith in all you guys. I think you’re all going to make it through.”</p><p>Which might have sounded generic, but there were days when I didn’t think I was going to make it through (and days I almost didn’t). I thought then, that even if part of the reason I’d taken the job was because I felt that I had something to prove to myself – I was doing fine, and so were my students, and it was worth the fact that I’d see my students, who I really was fond of, making it through these years. I supposed I couldn’t help worrying about them, but that didn’t mean they weren’t going to be all right.</p><p>“Thank you,” Victor said after a moment, “and…I’m happy things aren’t bad anymore.” I could tell from his voice, from his open, thoughtful expression, that he meant it all.  “I should go,” he said. “But have a good vacation.”</p><p>“Happy holidays,” I told him, waving goodbye, as I got in line behind an elderly woman buying some cigarettes. I saw him walk out of the store, and get into a blue car, and carefully drive away.</p><p>_</p><p>When I got home, there was a note written in black Sharpie on the floor, the words in Slava’s heavy, slanted handwriting, right where I would put my shoes. I supposed she’d decided to put it there so I would notice it at once, and couldn’t miss it the way I might if she’d put it on a table or something. </p><p><em>Going for a walk around the neighborhood. I will be back soon, do not worry your pretty head. -  your housewife. </em>I laughed a little, and put the note in my coat pocket. My fingers touched the cold metal of my cell phone, which I checked for messages.</p><p>I went to my contacts, sat down on the couch, and dialed Kara’s number. I prepared to think of something to say if I got sent to voicemail, and was surprised when she picked up. “Hello?” I heard her voice ask when I was quiet.</p><p>“Oh. Uh. Hi, Kara, it’s Theo,” I said, “I’m sorry for not calling earlier. I was…kind of busy…. I hope you’re doing well.”</p><p>“I was wondering what you’d been up to,” she said good-naturedly, and I didn’t know whether to feel bad, like I didn’t even know how to maintain a friendship, or to feel good, that I seemed to had a friend who kept me in her thoughts. “Did you get the invitation?”</p><p>“Invitation?” I asked, wondering if I sounded zoned-out, all echoing and insecure.</p><p>“Oh, well I just sent them, so maybe you didn’t see yet. I emailed out invitations for a New Years’ Party at my house if you’d like to come? And bring your plus-one…” she said in a tone that was encouraging, but a bit intimidating.</p><p>“Thank you,” I said, “I mean. Yeah. That sounds great. I’ll be out of town for a little while but I’ll be back for New Years’. And I’m sure it will be a great time,” I tried to sound encouraging in return. “I can’t remember the last time I’ve been to a party.” Actually, when I thought about it, it was probably my engagement party, which I wasn’t sure counted as a party or not. “I’m sure Slava will be happy to hear of this,” I said, adding a bit self-consciously, “ever since she heard I’d made a friend at work she’s wanted to meet you.” I wondered if that made me sound like someone who was incapable of making friends, or if it just sounded like I wanted to introduce Kara to Slava. The person I’d married. My wife. If no one was judging me, then I had to do something wrong to fuck it all up, didn’t I? I tried not to think like that.</p><p>“Well, it will be awesome to see the both of you!” Kara said. “How’s your vacation been? I’ve been volunteering at the language center and getting into Etsy. Otherwise I am making up for a <em>lot</em> of lost sleep. I’m sure the girls are doing the same. Can’t say I blame them.” I could envision her ironic smile.</p><p>“Actually,” I said, “that’s why I called you. Just to kind of … ask what you’d been doing. And talk about what I’ve been doing, too. Just, you know. To check up on each other.” I thought a moment before saying what I said next. “I spent a lot of time being really lonely, Kara. I don’t mean to be distant or anything. I really appreciate being friends with you.”</p><p>“Oh, Theo,” Kara said. “I get it. You’re all right, okay? Some things take time to get used to. I wasn’t always confident. I dealt with my problems and I retreated into myself because I thought that was less painful. I was so unhappy,” she said regretfully. “After a while I thought, are things perfect? No. Maybe they never will be. But I realized, I’d gotten past a lot of it, and I could live with what else was left, and maybe some of the problems wouldn’t have to be problems anymore, and nothing’s ever going to be perfect. You know what I mean?” she asked.</p><p>“I think,” I said, realizing what she’d said sounded not exactly like my life, but familiar. When I’d first met her and was new in school and in town, I was almost in awe, like she was so effortlessly sure of herself, I must have looked like a sad, wilted flower next to her. But then, I don’t know if people looked at me the way I feared they did all the time. And few things were effortless, and I’d quickly found that Kara just saw me as another person, not some freak or charity case. That was when I began to think I may have made a good decision in coming. “Yeah. I think I know what you mean.” I took a deep breath. “I’m really happy for you,” I said softly.</p><p>“I’m happy you’re my friend too,” Kara said. “So. What have you been doing?”</p><p>I thought maybe I’d begin at the end, or maybe that wasn’t what I was doing, maybe I was just going all the way back to the beginning. “I went to Kansas, to my mother’s hometown, to bury her ashes,” I said. “And I realized I wanted to take her last name.”   </p><p>“Have you gotten it legally done yet?” Kara asked. “And I’m happy for you, Theo. It was my own mother who taught me how important names are. Knowing who you are, taking your name back if it was taken from you.” I sensed this was a topic I could maybe speak with her about later, since she was alluding to it, maybe she wanted to talk about it, the way sometimes I’d allude to things with her before I really knew how to say it all. But I’d get to it. Sometimes it takes a while, to tell the whole story even to your friends. But since they’re your friends, they’ll wait, and you’ll wait for them. “You…you had a hard time with your dad, didn’t you? You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”</p><p>I sighed. “No, it’s fine. I can talk about it. And yeah. It…was not a good relationship, me and him. But it doesn’t hurt me anymore. I made peace with it, I think.”</p><p>“That’s good,” Kara said. “And I’m glad you have someone in your life to be with you while you go through this.” I smiled a little, putting a hand to my mouth modestly as if we’d been speaking in person.</p><p>“Oh yeah, I think you’ll enjoy meeting her,” I said, “I don’t usually celebrate New Year’s but this is really my favorite time of year anyway. So maybe that’s why I feel…” less bad? No, I wouldn’t say that. “Good lately.”</p><p>“I’ve always loved the winter. My birthday’s in February. Around the same time as the end of the football season so I’m always up to my eyebrows busy with the squad,” Kara laughed, “but it’s a good time. It’s …. I guess I’d say I feel the most thoughtful in winter. Not just in terms of considering other people but…evaluating my own life too.”</p><p>I felt myself nodding, my mouth open. “That makes so much sense,” I said. “I always feel like winter is this time where everything just makes more sense and you can see everything for how it is, now that the end of the year is coming.” I took a long exhale. “I usually make my best decisions at the end of the year,” I said wryly. “You?”</p><p>“Hm,” Kara said. “I’d say winter is the time of year I’ve had all my important realizations. So, I guess it’s similar for me.”</p><p>I bit my lip and smiled a little. “Well. Maybe soon we can compare and contrast,” I said, waiting to regret saying it, feeling like I’d said something over the line and indecent, and then, the moment never coming.</p><p>“Sure,” she said. “Call me anytime. Or come to my house sometime.” I almost didn’t know what to say. Thank you? No, that wasn’t it.</p><p>“Well,” I said breathlessly, “it would be nice to have you over sometime too. Or go out somewhere. Or just talking on the phone. But in person is good too. And I’ll be at the party, for sure.”</p><p>“Everyone will be talking about what you’re wearing, I’m sure,” she said, and when I didn’t immediately answer due to my wondering if people really did that at work and I just hadn’t noticed, she continued on, “in a nice way, obviously.”</p><p>“Yeah,” I stammered after a moment. “And…well, from what I hear of your cheer tournaments, I’m sure everyone will think the music choices at your party are excellent.”</p><p>“I can hope,” Kara said. “I have to go. But have a good day, Theo. I’ll see you around.”</p><p>“I’ll see you,” I said. “Take care.” I smiled to myself, and when Slava walked in the door, a few greasy paper bags that smelled like seafood in her arms, she looked at me and raised her eyebrows.</p><p>“You are in a good mood. That is nice to see,” she said, setting the bags on the table, then taking off her waist-length fake-fur trimmed black coat and hanging it over the chair. Underneath she was just wearing a long-sleeved black shirt and I hesitated over whether I should ask if she shouldn’t be wearing something warmer under her coat as well, like a sweater, to go outside.  </p><p>I smiled at her, trying to look enigmatic. “Well. We’re going to a New Year’s Eve party. My friend invited me. She’s looking forward to meeting you.”</p><p>“Well. Any friend of yours, is a friend of mine,” she said, reaching one hand into a bag and pulling out some clams on a paper plate, pushing it towards me. “This is Kara, yes?”</p><p>“Yeah,” I said. “I don’t know who else is going to be there though…I think some other coworkers but I’m not sure who else…” I felt myself grimacing. I didn’t want to still be this self-conscious, this afraid of being seen by other people, even ones I had no reason to distrust, people who had nothing against me. Maybe I was still getting used to not being in situations like that. But at least I could understand that things were in fact different, and people didn’t dislike me on sight now, didn’t have a lexicon of gossip about me in their minds when they met me. And maybe I liked hiding the fact that I was the Attack Girl. But also, I wanted to be more honest. Maybe I could let some people know what I’d been through, without being the Attack Girl, to them, to anyone.</p><p>I made myself smile. “Well. I’m sure it will be a great time. We haven’t really gone to a party together in a while. Not one that wasn’t just for the two of us, at least,” I added.</p><p>“Those are the best kind,” Slava said, her voice low as she leaned across the table, smiling wolfishly. “But this will be a great time, I am sure. Now. Are you going to eat your clams or not?” Somehow she was already about a third done with her meal. She still ate like she was starving, quickly and fiercely, sometimes cursing under her breath in Polish if she bit her tongue particularly hard.</p><p>“Why not,” I said, taking my bag and opening it. “After this we should get ready for New York.”</p><p>“You should plan all our travels from now on. Free of all charges except gas money, and I get to spend the whole trip alone with you. No train cars where you are not allowed to talk or airplane seats with drunk men asking if I am married,” she said, lifting the corners of her mouth in grim amusement, as she inhaled more clams.</p><p>“Well,” I said, raising my eyebrows, “now you can say to them, ‘fuck off, I am.’” Slava laughed, long and hard.</p><p>“That is right,” she said. I looked at her plate and somehow it was clean except for a few crumbs. I noticed I wasn’t even halfway done, and I supposed Slava noticed too. “I will call Hobie now and tell him we will be coming soon,” she said, “you can finish. I will be right here if you want to say anything,” she told me as she reached into her coat pocket for her phone and dialed his number, which I didn’t even realize she had on her phone, but I supposed made sense.</p><p>I mentally made a list of things I’d have to do before we left as I listened to the faint sound of the phone ringing, then picking up.</p><p>_</p><p>It was the middle of the night when we finally drove into New York City, and though I knew exactly what it was like, it still threw me off to be right there in the middle of the pulsating, vivid mass of the city at night. Sometimes on the radio I’d heard Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York,” and I appreciated it, but it always made me wonder if I’d ever really love the city ever again the way I did as a child, it made me wonder if I’d ever loved it or if I’d only loved it because of my mother and it was just all I knew, or if now I just was resenting it because it couldn’t love me- and maybe had never loved us- back.</p><p>It had truly been a long while, not just since I’d been in the city, not just since I’d been there at night, but since I’d really experienced the city in the middle of the night, and knew that “the city that never sleeps” means never rests, never stops.  The traffic was a trial, even at this time of night, although I supposed if I could do it in Massachusetts- as I’d had to drive through on the way tonight- I could do it here. The flashing lights that reached up to the top of the skyscrapers, the endless lines of cabs down the roads, the open clubs with the bass emanating from the speakers inside audible from the outside, the crowds of people in the streets, on the sidewalks, on balconies, everywhere. I was coming back, from the outside. I was seeing it for the thousandth time, for the first time.</p><p>“Wow,” I realized I’d said it aloud, my voice soft as a whisper. A car behind us honked about three times, which woke Slava up. (The car had been rather quiet inside since she’d fallen asleep- in addition to her talking, every time “Bodak Yellow” had come on, which was quite a few times, she’d cranked up the volume of the radio). She looked around blearily, rubbing her eyes, and smiled wistfully out the window.  Given that it was about a week until Christmas, all the trees were lit up.</p><p>“What a place, Princess,” she said. “I remember when you first told me you were from here! I had never been. And you were surprised because I had been so many places.”</p><p>“I remember you asked me if I knew everything about this country,” I told her. “I think I told you, no one does, especially people who live here, most people don’t know anything at all.” I’d only remembered that just now. She laughed. I thought of all the false antiques, the lies, the Park Avenue family trees stretching back to New Amsterdam and the Mayflower, names that could stretch back to nobility in Europe in some cases. My name, my mother’s name, her father’s name and his father’s name and all the words I didn’t know but I wanted to learn. “But, you know. That’s what I said then. I’m sure I’d have a different answer now,” I said.</p><p>“Do you ever think of writing in your journals again?” she asked me, sounding more awake.</p><p>“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe. Maybe I will.” I turned a corner, and realized I was on the right track after all, I hadn’t forgotten the way. And I’d come a long way since I’d first gone to where I was going, and I went down the same road until I saw the storefront and the bell, and saw the light on through the window upstairs, even at this hour.</p><p>As we got our things out of the car a group of fraternity guys who seemed to be drunk started howling from across the street. It struck me how much younger than us they seemed. “Hey girl!” One of them called to Slava. “It’s Brian’s birthday, he wants a kiss!”</p><p>Slava laughed fiercely and curled her hands around her mouth like a speakerphone. “Pocałuj mnie w dupe,” she called, then got back to taking her duffel bag out of the car. The guys went on, talking loudly about some party.</p><p>“I’m guessing you really told them,” I said, hauling my bags out of the car and locking the doors.</p><p>She laughed mischievously. “Your guess is good.” We walked towards Hobie’s place, getting towards the door. He’d told me he was going to leave the key under the doormat, even though I told him it was dangerous to do that and if it came to it we’d just stay overnight in a hotel and come over in the morning, but he insisted that we should come in if we got there. I put the key in the door and tried to open it as quietly as possible, but it was an old door and the wood creaked like it was being opened for the first time in decades.</p><p>“The light is on. Do you think he is awake?” Slava asked, her feet loud on the carpet.</p><p>“Shh,” I hissed at her. “If he’s not, then I think we should leave him in peace.” We found our way to the room that used to be mine, and still had some of my things in it. It looked like a clean version of those photos of abandoned houses- a room that someone had traces of the person who used to live there in it, but clearly wasn’t in use. I almost felt strange walking back in there.</p><p>I heard small footsteps and yapping. Slava turned around immediately, before I even had time to respond, picking up Popchyk and whispering to him in Ukrainian and kissing him. “He wants you,” she said to me, handing him as soon as my hands were free of my suitcases.</p><p>He wiggled around in my arms. “It’s ok,” I whispered to him. “I’m sorry for not visiting.” He responded by licking my hand. I sighed, wishing I had visited earlier, feeling much worse than I’d anticipated when I’d came in.</p><p>“I think I’m going to go to sleep in a few minutes,” I told Slava.</p><p>“Yah. I will too, probably,” she said, scratching behind Popchyk’s ears, her voice still loud enough that I considered warning her, but I didn’t.</p><p>In the bed I’d spent so much of my youth in, laying next to Slava, with Popchyk rolling around at the foot of the bed happily, I found I couldn’t sleep, no matter how tired I felt. Slava had fallen asleep almost immediately, but not me. My mind kept going back to different excerpts of my notebooks over the years Slava had recently shown me-</p><p>From when we lived in Vegas: <em>Kotku’s mom is really nice. I wish people wouldn’t say all that shit about her that they do. Who are they to judge her? The other day when we went to the R&amp;R to sleep over I woke up in the middle of the night and she came into the doorway and asked if I needed to talk about anything. I said I didn’t know how, and she said to me, sometimes it’s like that, it takes a while before you can. She asked me if I was going to be all right, and I told her, to not alarm her, maybe someday. And she said, she believed that day would come. </em></p><p>From the Park Avenue days: <em>The bridesmaids, whose names I can’t keep straight except Em, were crowding me when we ended up at some bakery the other day, one of those places where the inside is all white and pristine and everything seems French-inspired. I was zoning out and not listening to anyone as they gossiped about people I didn’t really know, and themselves, who I also didn’t really know. I reached into my purse and petted Popchyk’s head because he seemed nervous.  I wondered if they knew about Em and Kit, if I was the only one who hadn’t. They remind me of ladies in waiting assigned to a foreign bride they do not understand, following her because she is their new princess, unsure why she is there. “What about you, Theo?” One of the bridesmaids, I think her name is Lily, or Lilly, turned to me, her white peplum dress completely unstained by the cappuccino she was drinking. “Do you have any fun secrets?” No, I thought, I’m not like you people, none of my secrets are fun. Instead I lifted my eyebrows and drank some of my tea. “They wouldn’t be secrets if I talked about them,” I said delicately. They laughed a bit uncomfortably and then went on with what they were all talking about before.</em></p><p> From one of the later ones, written in one of the more affordable hotels I could find in St. Tropez, when I’d had to buy back an armoire<em>: Last night I dreamed I was in Amsterdam again. I held out the gun with my finger on the trigger. “I’ll do it,” I found myself threatening. But Slava wasn’t there for me to protect, and Martin wasn’t there for me to fight, and I was alone. And I realized I had the gun pointed at my head.</em></p><p>Maybe I would start writing things down again. To try and put it on record and make sense of it. To write down things in better times.</p><p>_    </p><p>When I woke up, the winter sun was casting its pale gold light through the windows, and since the curtains were opened, it all hit my eyes at once. I turned my head down and looked for the time on my phone, surprised at how late I’d slept. Popchyk climbed onto my lap as I sat up, and as I grew more acclimated to being awake, I heard Slava loudly talking in the other room, and the faint sound of Hobie’s voice. Driving all night was not something I wanted to be doing frequently, given from how tired my body felt. I knelt down next to one of my suitcases and pulled out a bathrobe, which I put on over my silk nightgown, which had me feeling cold and underdressed once the morning had come around. The sky outside was an ice blue, and the scene in the city was glistening with a coat of freshly fallen snow. “Come on,” I told Popchyk, too worn out to pick him up. I probably looked half-dead, but I walked out of the room anyway, Popchyk following behind, his little feet tapping on the floor behind me.</p><p>“Theo,” Hobie said warmly to me, and I instantly felt that strange mix of guilt and happiness- I’d been negligent in visiting him, even not calling enough, but he still was pleased to see me.</p><p>“Good morning,” I said. “I’ve missed you, Hobie. I see you and Slava have been catching up?” Popchyk ran as fast as he could over to Slava and curled up at her feet. She tore off a large piece of her toast and tossed it down to him.</p><p>“We’ve had a good conversation, but we’re happier now that you’ve joined. Come sit,” Hobie told me, and I realized I’d been standing at the doorway like a vampire who needed to be given permission in order to enter. He was dressed, but Slava wasn’t, which made me feel somewhat better about having gotten up so late and being in my bathrobe.</p><p>“I hope we didn’t wake you up last night,” I said. “We tried to be quiet.” I turned to Slava and raised my eyebrows. “Didn’t we?” She laughed a little, shaking her head at me.</p><p>“Well, I didn’t come across any problems last night, so I’d say the both of you are fine,” Hobie told us. “Anyway. Theo, I don’t want to forget to congratulate you as well.” He was quiet for a moment. I didn’t dare speak. I could feel every pulse area in my body hammering. “Theo, since you came back to live here and told me about Slava, I always hoped you’d be able to see each other again one day. I’m happy that the both of you were there for each other when you needed one another, and that you both had the chance to find one another again. I’m grateful that the both of you have one another.” He paused. “I can tell you, I think you’re both ready for a life together.”</p><p>I had no idea how to respond and speechlessly watched Slava, arms on the table, lean forward. I wondered if she’d told him, or if he’d noticed the rings; either way, he’d found out without me. Maybe he thought I was trying to hide it from him. “Ah, Hobie, you are so kind! You are truly like family to me now. I hope you are not offended we did not tell you until now. Theodora wanted to do it in person.” I realized I had to say something.</p><p>“Uh,” I said, trying to breathe in, “thank you, Hobie. Thank you so much. It really means a lot for you to tell us this. I know- I know things were really hard for you after Welty….” I got the sense that I was really fucking this up worse than I anticipated. I took a deep breath in. “I mean. I’m so sorry I didn’t tell you earlier. I didn’t want to tell you news like that over the phone, but now I realize I should have just told you.” I looked directly at him then. Slava was looking at me, eyes wide with confusion and a bit of concern. Hobie didn’t look disappointed. I didn’t understand. I’d been such a disappointment to him over the years and he still valued me like family. “I didn’t mean to be dishonest,” I said, my voice growing quieter and quieter with every word. I bit my lip so tightly it felt stapled shut. I felt Popchyk weave through my ankles playfully.</p><p>“No,” Hobie said understandingly, “don’t worry about that, Theo. You didn’t do anything wrong, all right?” his voice was gentle, and I looked into his eyes that saw me and knew me. Through the window, the frigid sunlight shone on his dark skin, and I could see his earring glimmer in the sunlight.</p><p>I swallowed hard, nodding my head silently. “Okay,” I said. “Thank you so much for having us. For always being there. Happy holidays.” I didn’t sound that happy, and my voice was shaking a little, but I was going for placid and calm, which I was almost at that point. Just being around Hobie felt safe. And lately, being around Slava had felt safe too. And, of course, Popchyk could never make me feel unsafe. So that left me, and my own dangers. I didn’t feel any longer like I was endangering anyone close to me, and though I hadn’t consciously thought of it in a while, I realized I no longer felt like I was in danger by virtue of anything I was doing or might do. Getting used to things was strange. But I’d gotten used to a lot in my life.</p><p>“Of course,” Hobie said to us, but looking at me. “It’s great to have you here. Popper has missed you both. Just look at how excited he is.” Slava bent down and put him on her lap.</p><p>“Princess,” she said to me, Popchyk’s head looking up to her face. “I know you are never hungry in the morning, but you should have some of the tea.”</p><p>“All right,” I said, and poured myself a cup of jade green tea from the antique teapot. It was warm still, and rich and fragrant. “It really is nice to be back,” I said, smiling a little, Popchyk nipping at my bare toes, having jumped to the floor. I was telling the complete truth. I didn’t have to lie- it really was good.</p><p>_</p><p>Later in the day, I’d gotten dressed, and Slava had gone out to meet up with Gyuri. I told her I could come out later, but I was going to stay in for a while. “Tell Gyrui I hope everything is all right with him,” I said as Slava made her way to the door, in black winter boots with fake silver fur like a girl in a music video, “and button up your coat, it’s really cold out.”</p><p>“Of course,” Slava told me, leaving, but not before she did up her buttons. Popchyk barked quietly once she closed the door.</p><p>“Don’t worry, she’ll be back,” I told him, sitting down on the couch and watching him climb up next to me. Hobie was right near where I was, reading a Sotheby’s catalog. I waited a moment to say what I felt I needed to say.</p><p>“Hobie,” I began tentatively. “I just wanted to tell you that I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner.”</p><p>Hobie immediately looked up from the catalog, putting a leather bookmark in it and setting it aside, looking puzzled. “You don’t have to apologize,” he said, “I know now. I know you certainly weren’t trying to…deceive me, or anything of the sort. I wouldn’t have minded if you told me earlier, but I respect that you wanted to say it in person.” I couldn’t meet his eyes. Popchyk was sniffing at his hands as if searching for treats.</p><p>“No,” I said, staring at the floor. My voice was so small I worried he wouldn’t be able to make out what I was saying. “I mean.” I put my hands over my face, knowing I was about to start crying. “I mean I’m so sorry I didn’t <em>tell you…</em>ever. I did lie to you for years. About that. And I had no good reason to lie to you like that and I’m so sorry.” By then I was crying, and wondering if I was coherent enough to be understood. I drew my knees up and put my wet face into them, wrapping my arms around myself in hopes that I would stop, or get quieter. I felt Hobie encircling his arms around me.</p><p>“You don’t have to be sorry,” he whispered into my ear as I cried, unable to stop myself. “Do you know that, Theodora?” I wasn’t sure if I had, but the fact that he was saying so meant something. “You needed to get to a point in your life where you could be who you were. And sometimes it takes us a while to get there, sometimes it takes longer than it should. But it isn’t your fault, Theo. You weren’t lying to me. You were trying as hard as you could. I knew you had a hard time. I couldn’t have known everything that was in your mind, and I do sometimes wish I’d asked more. I regret not doing that sometimes. You know, I saw a lot of myself in you. In a lot of ways. I still do, Theo. When you were in pain, I saw my own pain in you. That’s why I think I can understand why you did some of the things you did.” It was unspoken- he didn’t only mean the changelings, or else he would have been clearer regarding that. The engagement, the drugs, the different results of my pain begetting pain. I was crying into the inside of his elbow, not sure if I’d ever stop.</p><p>“But it’s all right now, Theo,” he assured me. I only shook my head. “Little cub,” he said to me gently, the way he’d held me and said that when I came to him in the night from Las Vegas, shaking and cold with the rain. “It’s all right. It’s all right.” I inhaled, trying to stop, and raised my head a little.</p><p>“Do you really think,” I managed to say, sniffling and shaking, looking up at him. I didn’t know what to think.</p><p>“I do,” he insisted, holding me in his arms. “And I think you’ve been through a lot, and have overcome a lot, and soon, you’ll see it’s all right now, too. I know that because I know you, and because I’ve gone down some of the same roads you have.”</p><p>“I know,” I told him, managing to speak somewhat clearly. “I think that’s why I never wanted to say anything. I didn’t want to make it feel worse for you, to bring it up.” I sniffed, and cleared my throat. I felt Hobie exhaling, his arms around my shoulders. “But I think sometimes I used that to tell myself it also wasn’t about not knowing how to talk about things I didn’t know how to talk to anyone, even you, even though there was no reason I couldn’t have told you…”</p><p>“I’m not going anywhere,” Hobie told me reassuringly. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Popchyk tilting his head quizzically at us. “We can always make up for lost time. Do you know that?” He looked into my eyes then. And the first thing I thought of was how whenever I thought I’d made any progress, I was hit with the weight of how much I had to regret, stretching out behind me like footprints forever stamped in concrete. It felt sometimes like I’d never be able to catch up with all my regrets, like it would be too much to even try. But in that moment, I wanted to try, for Hobie’s sake, if not just mine.</p><p>I nodded slowly. “I know I’ve had a lot of… problems in the past. And maybe you worried about me. But you can tell me whatever you like. You don’t have to hide anything from me. You shouldn’t keep it all to yourself,” I could hear the concern in my voice even if I tried to keep it down to a minimum.</p><p>“I won’t,” Hobie told me, “and neither should you.” I had mostly stopped crying by then, but my whole face hurt, even my teeth.</p><p>“If Mr. Bracegirdle had put me in a foster home…If I couldn’t have stayed with you…I don’t know what I would have done. I don’t know what would have happened to me. I don’t know if I’ll ever know how to thank you enough. But I want you to know that even if I didn’t always show it to you, going to live with you was the best thing that could have happened to me in my circumstance.” I’d always thought Hobie was aware of this, and that’s why we never really talked about it even as the process was just beginning – neither of us wanted to think about what could happen, what decisions could be made on our behalf, beyond either of our control, the harm that could have been caused.</p><p>“I’m glad you came home, Theo,” Hobie said to me after a long moment. I knew he had known exactly what I meant, and felt the same. And if New York couldn’t ever be a home to me the way it was when my mother was alive, I supposed I’d always have a home here, with Hobie.</p><p>“So am I,” I said to him. Even though I felt exhausted and drained and wanted to just lie down and close my eyes, it felt good to tell him the truth, to realize that I could.</p><p>_</p><p>Slava and I were out late that night. She and Gyuri had met up with Myriam at some club, and she texted me the address, so I got a taxi and went to meet her. Surprisingly, it felt so natural to me, to just be there with everyone knowing what Slava and I were to one another. Maybe that was because I suspected for a long time that Slava had confided in them over the years almost everything about herself there was to know- they trusted her because they really knew her.</p><p>In the dark club, the strobe lights kept flashing so that I could barely see anyone in clear light- reds and blues and purples illuminating everyone in shadows. Slava looking simultaneously like something out of a nightmare or an acid trip, Myriam looking like some figure from one of her Tarot cards- both Empress and High Priestess, Gyuri looking like an actor in a noir movie. I wasn’t sure how I looked. Probably something similar.</p><p>At one point I asked the question. “All right,” I began, “I’m not really sure the right way to approach this but…are we all safe here?” Myriam smiled slyly, her small mouth twisting as she reached out her hands toward mine. On one wrist I saw her pentagram tattoo, on the other, the word GÜC in gothic letters. Techno music blared in the background.</p><p>“No one here will question my authority,” said Myriam. “You must know by now that I am the one in charge?” I nodded. “You are safe. We are all safe here. This is my place,” she gestured to herself vaguely. When I’d first met her, she’d intimidated me, even though she’d been so welcoming to me, saying she knew so much about me. What I saw then in Myriam was something similar to Slava. She would not let anything get her down, and she had a gentle touch.</p><p>“Besides,” added Gyuri, turning toward me, “no one you would need to worry about is even in this country.” He smiled grimly. “Or,” he said, “they are dead.” That, I supposed, was very true.</p><p>I was almost surprised to hear what Slava said next. She leaned back in her battered chair and smiled, showing a few of her side teeth. “And if anyone says they saw me,” she said slowly, “then they will just be saying rumors the way people have been saying for a long while now.” She leaned forward, looking around at all of us and then directly to me. “Some say, I took all my money and ran to New Zealand, but one day I will be found. Some say, I am under an assumed identity and became an informant for the FBI, and you can still see me in some places. Some say, I got surgery and now have a new face, could be anyone. Someone told me he heard someone say as revenge one of Martin’s associates gouged out my right eye but only the one so I could watch him feed it to the hogs. Hah! I told him, do I look like that happened!” I winced a little. Slava continued on. “Some say- because Myriam does not go about saying anything more than that she took my place in my absence- that I am dead. Execution, heroin, crystal meth, Martin, strange theories about me being this or that unidentified dead woman. So many stories. They did not know where I came from and they have no idea what became of me.” She laughed. “Even if someone sees me, they do not know. They probably do not even think they saw me. Just a ghost from the past, someone who looked like someone they once knew.” </p><p>I think in that moment, I saw that Slava was free of her past, in a way I hadn’t considered before. She’d just described alternate paths for her that plausibly could have happened if she’d stayed where she was. She’d been where she was because of what her life had been like. But it wasn’t like that anymore, and didn’t have to be. And I think she was saying goodbye to the life she’d lived by acknowledging all that could have become of her, and not running away from it, but just recognizing it as something she’d left behind- something that had left her behind.</p><p>“Our ghosts are the people we were, or would have been, but are not anymore,” Gyuri said thoughtfully. “All of us, I think.”</p><p>Slava nodded. “And because we are alive, we can see the difference. But only if we know ourselves.” The red light flashing over her contemplative face made her look like she was in a dark Orthodox church, standing over the votive candles.</p><p>“За здоровье,” Myriam said evenly, raising her glass of whiskey, and Gyuri and Slava followed echoing her, and then I did too, raising my glass and repeating the words.</p><p>We stayed later into the night than I had anticipated. But I didn’t mind, and nothing bad happened – we weren’t the way we used to be, but that didn’t mean we needed to be afraid of the past all the time. And regardless of what else she or I may have been afraid of, concerning that, I don’t think we were anymore.</p><p>_</p><p>I hadn’t checked my phone all that night, but by the time we got back to Hobie’s place- well after midnight, with me admonishing Slava as we walked through the door to please be quiet so we wouldn’t wake him up, even though Popchyk was yapping happily upon seeing us back- I thought it would be a good choice to. I saw I had a message, which didn’t exactly surprise me, but I was not expecting to see it was from Platt.</p><p>It wasn’t that I had no contact at all with the Barbours. In fact, there were occasions I still saw them, although I hadn’t seen them in person since moving to Massachusetts, which had been a while ago. But Platt wasn’t usually the one to contact me. As Slava took off her shoes and got ready for bed while playing with Popchyk, I distractedly put my handbag on the floor while opening the text:</p><p>
  <em>Hey Theo. Merry Christmas. Hope you’re doing fine. You probably are doing a lot better than if you had married into this family, to be honest. You should be getting a card soon. Kit really convinced Mommy to get all dressed up and in the family picture again like the old days. I’m really messaging you because I’m not sure if anyone else in the family told you and you should probably know about this. You might not believe this or want to hear it but there’s a film coming out on that channel with all those dramatic made-for-TV chick flicks coming out that’s pretty obviously based on you. I’m not trying to offend you, believe me. Just look up “Prairie Rose”. </em>
</p><p>My first thought was, <em>fucking “Prairie Rose?” Seriously?  </em>Slava must have guessed something was up because she looked up from the bed at me curiously. “What is going on?” she asked, stripping down to her see-through black underclothes because her nightshirt was being washed and apparently she didn’t want to sleep in sweatpants despite it being December. Which I didn’t mind, and would likely lead to us holding each other throughout the night, but given that we were under Hobie’s roof I had the uncomfortable feeling he would find out every detail somehow, and even though I knew he wasn’t judging us, I still felt strange. I supposed it would take time, as he told me, and I realized that if we were staying with anyone other than Hobie I’m not sure if I would have had the confidence to stay in the same room as Slava, even though we had been joined in marriage by law.</p><p>But then, I had a distraction from thinking about all of that. “You’ll never believe this,” I said drolly. “Platt Barbour just texted me and-” I was firing off a brief text to him, <em>haha thank you for the heads up. Merry Christmas. I can send a card to your family too if they want one.</em></p><p>Slava raised her eyebrows high. “Your ex-fiancé’s stupid brother? What does he want? And which one is he again?” she said. I don’t think she was all that satisfied to have to think about my former fiance’s brother, but then, neither was I at the moment. Platt had a way of turning up always at the worst moments.</p><p>I sighed. “The oldest one, Slava. And if you hadn’t interrupted me I would have told you by now,” I said, only a little frustrated. It was always hard for me to really be mad at her. “The thing is, he says that there is going to be a TV movie loosely based on my life coming out soon.” I felt myself grimacing a little. “I guess…if it’s based loosely enough and doesn’t name names…it is legal…but I don’t like it,” I thought aloud.</p><p>“America,” Slava said with her hands out. “When you really needed help who was there for you? Not the social services. Not the government. Not the media. Even the fucking courts of law, that put those guys away in the first place, did they ever do anything for you? And not those people, they did nothing.” I assumed she either meant the Barbours or the general crowd they were a part of. “And now they want to film your story and make money off of you?” she shook her head in disapproval.</p><p>I thought about what she’d said. I’d been alone in the world for a very long time. I’d almost been ripped away from Hobie and placed who knows where, just like my mother had been sent to live with her aunt who hated her, because social services said she was the most fitting guardian. The media had harassed and bombarded me, and when I gave no response, put my name and some information in the papers and magazines. “Girl In Museum Attack Adopted by Park Avenue Family,” joyous headlines telling the tale of salvation that really seemed like they were saying my life was much better than it had been with my mother, who was barely mentioned at all in these articles, like she was at best barely relevant. People would always ask for assurance, <em>but you surely don’t think the whole right wing is like that? Theodora, I’m sure you don’t think that the views of that group are common at all. This is the twenty-first century. </em>My college boyfriend who wrote poetry about how much he loved crazy girls, who told me I was <em>worldly</em> and <em>exotic</em> but also said  it wasn’t really my fault but I just didn’t understand the world around me, once told me when I woke up screaming- <em>you’re fortunate, to have someone like me, who’s understanding of your volatile personality</em>, and he wrapped his arms around me as I screamed for him to let me go. And everyone acted like the Barbours had saved me, but I didn’t deserve it, and I would never be wanted. Wherever I went I was unwanted. It had always been this way, it felt like, me and my mother, and then everyone else. They didn’t want her or me. But they wanted me to give them all my secrets, to be a blank canvas for them to paint whatever they liked on, and the assurance I’d do whatever they asked. They wanted this most of all because even when I gave them what they wanted, it wasn’t what they’d expected, and they knew somewhere I would draw a limit at what I was willing to do.</p><p>So I suppose it made sense that there was a filmed version of my life, although it kind of surprised me, because I hadn’t thought I was that well known, but I supposed that’s why I was on a made-for-TV network rather than the big screens, and I had purposefully kept away from looking up myself in the media for years. I supposed it made sense after all. It may have been spiteful, but I took enjoyment out of the fact that some of my adversaries in Park Avenue would be unhappy at this news- <em>oh, do we really have to go through this all over again? All because some third-rate television writers obsessed with Dateline wanted to get ratings from Midwestern housewives who are so bored they actually want to hear about such gruesome things? </em> I had a feeling many people there wouldn’t watch it, but I wondered about the Barbours. I had a feeling Platt would be watching it while hammered. Mrs. Barbour, Kit…I wasn’t so sure about.</p><p>“We’ll watch it,” I told Slava decisively. “If they’re going to do all that, I deserve to know what they’re saying.” A lot of people who watched it would probably never meet me and given that it was a story somewhat inspired by my life rather than a biopic, many people might never even know it was about me, or hear about me if they didn’t already know. It had been over a decade, and that is a very long time for national tragedies; there are so many. Over the years, the media outlets had mostly forgotten not only me, but the Museum Attack in general, except for the rare anniversary, or news of one of the members of the syndicate, or news of those who would credit the syndicate inspiration for their own attacks.</p><p>Slava laid down on the bed, nodding a little. “That makes sense, Theodora. If you are fine with seeing it, I will be right there with you.” She smiled at me. “Of course, I am sure they will leave out many important parts,” she added, her voice silky as she stretched her arms back like she was on the beach. I covered my mouth with my hands so I wouldn’t laugh too loud. I could see scars all over her body, I could see so much of what she’d survived, but I also saw her happy and free and living in the moment, and in the moment, everything was more than all right, and she wanted me to come closer.</p><p>“We can’t wake Hobie up,” I whispered, warning Slava, not just meaning we couldn’t speak too loud. She winked at me.</p><p>“Okay. We will wait,” she told me as I got into the bed next to her. Years ago, when I’d arrived back in New York all alone except for Popchyk, I’d spend months laying awake at night, wishing she was next to me so I could feel safe. But now, I knew I was safe.</p><p>“Good night, Slava,” I said, putting my arm around her, my flannel sleeve against her bare stomach.</p><p>“Good night, my Princess,” she said to me, pressing her mouth to my hand and leaving a blood-red lipstick print, her cold toes against my feet, as we lay still and Popchyk walked around on the bed in search of the best spot to sleep.</p><p>_</p><p>The next evening, Slava and I got on the couch in front of Hobie’s television, which appeared to be from the 1990s, but still functioning. Popchyk was asleep between us, even though Slava had the television blaring loud enough for Hobie to come in from his bedroom where he’d been going over the books for the shop.</p><p>“What are you watching?” he asked as he walked in. Slava looked toward me to say it.</p><p>“Well,” I said, suddenly feeling very weird having to tell him about this, like I was personally responsible for it, “I was told that they made a TV movie that was kind of based on my life. So…”</p><p>“We wanted to see what it was like,” Slava added, her tone challenging, as if she was preparing for an argument with the people who made the movie.</p><p>“Based on your life in what way – are you sure that you want to watch this, Theo?” Hobie said, concerned for me as he realized the answer to his own question was that whatever parts of my life it was based on, it could not be about anything very nice.  </p><p>I looked up at him and nodded, smiling slightly at him. “It’s okay, Hobie,” I said. For a brief moment I considered what I would have done had the network contacted me a few years ago with permission to use my name in exchange for a cut of the profits- would I have taken the offer in exchange for the knowledge Hobie wouldn’t be in danger of being bankrupted or evicted? Would it have even been enough revenue for that? “It really is. I’m safe where I am.” I hoped he understood my meaning- that at least for this couple of hours, he didn’t have to be worried for me, because he was one of the reasons I could truly believe I was safe. Even if I would never believe the world to be a safe place- and not for no reason – there were times I could feel secure. People I could feel all right with, without having to compromise who I was, or spend every moment waiting for it to end.</p><p>“Okay,” Hobie said gently, as if to say, I’m glad you’re okay now (or as okay as I could be). “I think I’ll join you, then. I’m done looking over the checkbook for the weekend, anyway.”</p><p>The television channel was playing some commercial for a fitness program. Without a word, Hobie sat down next to us as we waited for the movie to begin. Popchyk had moved onto Slava’s lap. For a brief moment, Hobie laid his hand on mine. The television flashed a warning, <em>mature content</em>, and I felt ready.</p><p>_</p><p>I didn’t realize she was supposed to be me at first, although I guess I wasn’t surprised. In the movie she was called Dakota Rose Thorpe- immediately called by her full name in a therapist’s waiting room. Dakota Rose Thorpe was honey-blonde and pale-skinned and had light blue eyes. She wore a wrinkled, V-neck cable-knit sweater and a long A-line skirt that made her look like a depressed Talbot’s catalog model, and also, now that I thought about it, the actress resembled a photograph of a younger Mrs. Barbour I’d once seen. </p><p>“You can just call me Dakota,” she said in a sad, reedy voice to the therapist, who asked her why she had come in today. “Well,” Dakota continued, “I have a lot I’ve been thinking about. Do you know me?”</p><p>“Well,” said the therapist, an older man, diplomatically, “this is the first time you have come in, but I did correspond with you to set up an appointment on my email.”</p><p>Dakota pulled a yellowed news article out of her purse. “You know me,” she said wearily, “even if you think you don’t.” The headline: <em>DOZENS KILLED IN FREAK ACCIDENT AT THEATRE, </em>with the image of a collapsed building, the roof caved in, fire trucks and ambulances surrounding the area. The camera focused on her face.</p><p>“I remember,” the therapist said after a long moment. “You are the girl.” Wasn’t that a line from <em>Mulholland Drive</em>, I thought? Was Dakota about to face the camera and start screaming? I probably would have at some point in my life.</p><p>The screen faded and the title credits- <em>PRAIRIE ROSE</em>, in a dusty pink script over a dark gray background- flashed over piano music that sounded funereal. As I watched, the gist of Dakota’s situation seemed to be revealed in intermittent flashbacks-  that as a child, she and her divorced and equally pallidly white mother Hope (I know) moved out of rural South Dakota to New York City to “start a new life.” Hope and Dakota were extremely close, and one day went to see a play at an off-Broadway theatre. Unfortunately, the historic building it was housed in wasn’t well-preserved, and the roof collapsed, bringing some of the walls down with it, instantly killing dozens of people. Convenient storytelling, I thought. No one did it to anyone.</p><p>But Dakota survived, and was taken in by some wealthy friend’s family, the de Konings. Dakota and her friend and classmate Frederick- sand blond, descended from New Amsterdam founding families- seemed to have a somewhat precocious boyfriend-girlfriend relationship, approved of by his stately socialite mother Abigail. After a few months, though, Dakota’s no-good father showed up to take her back to her hometown.</p><p>“How the fuck did they know about all that?” I wondered aloud. Maybe they didn’t. Maybe, as I watched and the story unfolded, this was just what people would assume.</p><p>In the taxi, the young Dakota put her hand to the window forlornly as Frederick waved goodbye sadly, and Abigail had a hand over her heart. Yes, really. I rolled my eyes, and Slava turned to me and said “that has <em>nothing</em> on us. I <em>ran</em> after that fucking taxi when it took you.”</p><p>All of this was mostly interspersed between the main story, which was that Dakota was now living back in New York City as an adult and working in a vintage clothing shop under the mentorship of its owner Simon, who also survived that night at the theatre. (Hobie and I exchanged a brief, troubled glance at this part, but neither of us said anything). Dakota, dealing with the trauma of losing her mother, experiencing the freak accident that almost killed her, and spending years with her abusive alcoholic father who died in a motorcycle crash when Dakota was seventeen, became a very lonely woman who spends most of her time by herself and seems to have no friends. Slava laughed at many of these parts- “they forgot something,” she said.</p><p>But one day, Abigail comes to the shop to sell some of her designer clothes from decades past, and invites Dakota to her home when she recognizes her, reuniting Dakota and Frederick and setting them on the path of beginning a tentative romance together. Dakota makes it clear that she wants to love Frederick, but she doesn’t know if she can be with him, because she feels so broken. When Frederick’s father and brother die – their sailboat crashing against the rocks during a storm – Frederick tells Dakota he understands what she means but he still wants to be with her. Throughout the movie, Dakota occasionally visits a therapist, which provides the preludes to the flashbacks to young Dakota and Frederick, to teenaged Dakota being screamed at and beaten by her father and whispered about by school cliques, to young adult Dakota first arriving back in New York and being taken in by Simon.</p><p>At one point Dakota goes home with Frederick, stays late after dinner, and then there is no question that she will stay the night. The post-coital scene with Frederick protectively holding his arm around Dakota’s white shoulders (like the perfume, quintessential American romance) begins with Dakota saying “you’re the only man I’ve ever loved, the only one I’ve ever been with. I’ve never even been in a relationship before. But I don’t know if you’re meant to be with someone like me.” There is no reflection among the two of them on what any of this means. </p><p>“You’re perfect for me,” Frederick says. Kit never said anything like that and from the beginning we both knew deep down we weren’t perfect for one another, not at all.</p><p>They get engaged, and Abigail approves and is happier than she’s ever been. But there is no sign that she ever stayed all day in bed in the dark, or confined herself to the house and never saw any visitors, and turned out to have no real friends who would go out of their way even an inch to be by her side. She is like a fairy godmother to Dakota’s Cinderella, although I’d say there were also elements of Pretty Woman and My Fair Lady that went into the movie, which was odd given that I’d went into it thinking it was going to be a crime drama. But then, I supposed, it was never going to be that true to life. What was true to life was the fact that Dakota is not completely accepted by everyone- but mostly, this is just a few people’s rude comments, and Abigail and Frederick stand up for her.</p><p>I think Kit was so used to the environment he lived in that he couldn’t see it through my eyes. He either couldn’t see the hatred and scorn directed toward me even when it was in front of him or he chose to believe it wasn’t hatred, just disagreeing personalities. I’m not sure if Mrs. Barbour spent enough time around other people really listening to them to know what they thought of me when I was engaged to her son, but she had to know when I was living with her as a child. But then, by the time I was an adult and met her again, she had to know that no one from that crowd was a true friend to her either. She just didn’t care anymore. I wondered if, as Mrs. Barbour the younger, I would have turned out the same. Entombed in my room, surrounded by antique furniture and old paintings and like I was living centuries in the past, completely alone, numbed by pills, fading away. Waiting to die.</p><p>The movie progressed, with some romantic montages, some dramatic flashbacks of Dakota’s father drunkenly pushing her against the wall and screaming at her for being a “whore like your cheating mother” for walking home from school with a male friend, and young Dakota from then on being afraid to be with boys, continuing on to her adulthood where she never has any boyfriends even though Simon always encouraged her to go out with the young male customers who show interest in her (at this, Hobie and I looked at each other, not knowing where to begin in our mutual astonished confusion).</p><p>The night before the wedding- scheduled on the day of the anniversary of the accident, because Dakota and Frederick wanted to “replace the bad memories with good ones”- Dakota panics and runs in the middle of the night to the airport, going back to her hometown. She stays in her father’s old house, where her father’s biker widow Tamara still lives. Tamara advises her- “if you find a good man, keep him. Don’t just settle for any man like I did.” Dakota stays for a while, only telling Simon where she is until Tamara and Simon both tell her that Frederick and his family might think something terrible happened to her if she doesn’t call.  </p><p>Dakota calls Frederick, and says she was afraid, and still feels afraid, but that she loves him and she hopes that he can love her, “even with this fear and this darkness inside of me.” (I was speechless at this line of dialogue.) Frederick tells her that he’s always loved her since they were children, and it doesn’t matter what she’s been through, all that matters is the future. Dakota returns, and the two have a picturesque wedding that looked more like something out of a generic bridal magazine than out of something Park Avenue types would host. White flowers, white satin dress, white veil, white diamond, against her pale skin and hair, like a ghost manifesting into solidity, like an ice sculpture displayed at a wedding. “You saved me,” she whispers to Frederick as the vows are read off.</p><p>“And you saved us,” he whispers back. They kiss under an archway of flowers, calla lilies and roses. A white rose petal falls like a snowflake as the wind blows. “My prairie rose.” Flash-forward a year and Dakota, now known as Dakota der Koning, and Frederick, are happily married. On the anniversary of the death of Dakota’s mother, Frederick approaches her, saying he is sorry that it is the day her mother died, and sometimes on the day his father and brother died, he feels the grief again. Dakota is quiet for a moment then tells him that she still feels grief, but this day isn’t just a day of sadness anymore- it’s the day she realized she would let herself marry him, the day she realized she wanted to be alive.</p><p>They watch the sun set over the cityscape from their penthouse window, hand in hand, and the screen fades to black. I was quiet as the credits sped through and a commercial for another movie took over the screen. I must have been quiet for a while because Hobie turned to me and asked, “Theo, are you all right?”</p><p>I blinked, as if coming out of a trance. “Oh. Yeah…I just….don’t really know how to respond to that right now.” I smiled awkwardly. “That was … something else.”</p><p>“I do not know what the fuck that was- forgive my language, Hobie,” Slava said pointing at the television, “but that was not your life.”</p><p>No, I thought, it wasn’t. And it wasn’t supposed to be. The people who made the movie didn’t specifically want the truth, I thought, any more than the reporters who’d called incessantly hoping to get something on record from me. They wanted parts of me, parts of my story, so that they could use and repurpose them for their own record of events. They weren’t concerned with me as a person, but as a source to take from and use and leave. They wanted to see the part of my story that made them say, oh, how sad, oh, poor child, but it’s nice someone’s taking her under their wing- she’ll be much better off than she ever would have before. They did not want anything to be someone’s fault, or if it was, they did not want to think about the conditions and history that had led to such people having an ideology that would drive them to kill in the name of preserving a tradition that amounted to a trail of bloodshed through the timeline of history, a so-called culture that existed within their own spheres and groups like theirs. These people did not see someone like Dakota the way they would have seen me, had they known exactly who they were targeting, and sometimes I wondered if they did.</p><p>I was not Dakota any more than my mother was Hope. Part of me remembered myt dream of facing my younger self and I wanted to go back into it. I wanted to say: listen to me, you will always be who you are, and accepting that will be the best thing you ever do for yourself. None of hese other people, especially the one who puts a ring on your finger, will save you. If you go through with it you’ll fade until you die. What do you think you need to be saved from? Your self-destruction, or your own self? Of course, I knew the answers now. I knew who I was.</p><p>I was not Dakota at all and had never been and never would be. No one ever wanted her to apologize for being who she was, without planning to ever accept an apology they assumed she would provide, no matter what she did. The people around her were all gentle and welcoming and accepting to her. In the end she essentially replaces the memory of her mother with the present of her life in a new home, under a new name. Her memories are not something she heals from. They are pushed to the back of her mind, and you don’t have to heal from something that doesn’t exist, and the memories are falsified from the real events. Dakota looks like the women in Park Avenue they wished Kit would have married. She looks like one of my bridesmaids who would stare at me blankly for extended moments, and turn to another and say I was so quiet, and when I would speak they would not know what to say and come up with something like “oh” or “how unusual”. She looks like someone who is secure enough that she has never considered any other perspective. Of course she does. In their minds, to tell my story in a way that incites more than pity or distaste or horror, it would have probably been easiest to do what the producers and screenwriters and casting agents did- make it so that it can be their story, then. Theirs to comfort themselves with. The story tapers off safely and does not reach back and have twisted roots deep into the ground, maybe somewhere beneath everyone’s feet. They put my mother and I out of their minds a long time ago, and remembered what and how they chose to. It was easiest for them, it was natural for them. If people carry down the beautiful things they love through the centuries, then the other side is that they send down a legacy through their generations to forget and misremember and rewrite until their history is the way they like it, and everything unsavory to them no longer in their records.</p><p>Dakota is a woman named after a state named after a people who she does not know. Her name does not belong to her, but she’d never know it because she’s so secure in it, and when she takes her husband’s name she becomes a person disconnected from her past, and thus liberated. Her past is not a site of trauma to heal from so much as an abyss to move forward from, her real life ahead of her. She is ominous, an apparition, with a thousand versions of my death in her eyes, but she does not see me at all, she never has and never will. Her name is just a name to her- she takes another one on, wearing it like a crown at a coronation, her maiden name cast aside like a snake’s old skin. But me- my name did not belong to me either, but to my father, and his father before him, a line of men who hurt their children and left them disconnected to their fathers. The name of my father, who saw my mother’s influence in me as something to distrust. And now I needed to take back my name, my mother’s name, the name of my family who had kept it, who had their name, regardless of what else the world took from them. Not because I needed to be a new person to live. But because I needed to allow myself to be who I really was. Because I did not want to die, and I did not want to kill myself, and I would no longer be trying to kill any parts of myself, no matter what anyone else thought.</p><p>“Well,” I said to Hobie and Slava, “now that I’ve thought about it, I’m not…<em>surprised</em>, exactly.” I leaned back in the couch and looked to both of them. “And I’m glad my life didn’t turn out like that,” I told them, just so they would hear me say it, because I needed to say it, even if perhaps the point this film loosely based on my life offered was that my life was never going to turn out like Dakota’s anyway.</p><p>Slava leaned against my shoulder. “You are good where you are,” she said contentedly, and I took her hand.</p><p>“I always had faith you would get to where you needed to be,” Hobie said after a moment. I looked into his eyes, knowing he was telling the truth, even if there were times when he may have had reasons to fear on my behalf. I just smiled at him, not knowing what else to say that I hadn’t already told him, or that he didn’t already know.</p><p>We were all at peace, I thought. And it had taken a long time, and it wasn’t easy, but it was on our own terms and we had it now.</p><p>_</p><p>That night I sent Michael a message: <em>I hope you are doing well. Happy holidays, I hope to hear from you soon. </em>Within about twenty minutes I received a message back, but it wasn’t from Michael, I saw, but from Daniel. I knew Michael wasn’t big on texting, he’d told me as much back in Kansas, I figured he’d call or write back soon.</p><p><em>Hope your vacation is nice, Theo. I guess we’ll see each other at Kara’s party? Happy holidays. D, </em>he signed off. I sent a message back-</p><p>
  <em>I’m doing well and I hope you are too. I guess we will- there’s someone you should meet. Haven’t been to a real party in a while so this should be something. </em>
</p><p>Now that I was messaging people, and Slava was in the shower taking her time, I kept going.</p><p>To Philip- <em>I’m in New York staying with Hobie. I know how it is for you. We all understand if you can’t come. But we’d love to hear from you if you call anyway. I really wish the best for you in England, or wherever you go. I’m doing better. I actually really am this time. I want to hear from you. Hobie does too. We’re his family. And I’m grateful we all have that in each other. </em></p><p>To Kit- <em>Hey. I hope you and your family are all right. I’m better than I ever have been. I wanted to tell you I wear the tourmaline ring now, and I love her so much, and she loves me. I didn’t say anything to you when you said you were sorry for not knowing, but I knew what you meant. And I hope you can find real love too, and not feel like you need to hide it. I truly wish you well. </em></p><p>To Kara<em>- Merry Christmas! I’m in New York right now. But I’ll be back for your party. And if you want to make plans anytime, I’m up for it. There’s been a lot going on in my life lately, but it’s fine. It’s all things that needed to happen sometime. And I’m glad they’re happening. Maybe this sounds crazy in a text and I should just wait to tell you in person. But we’ll get to do that soon anyway. Good night- and if you’re already asleep I hope I didn’t wake you up. I sometimes forget not everyone stays up as late as I do.</em></p><p>I put my heated phone down on the antique night table and lay back on the bed, staring at the ceiling. I wasn’t tired, but I didn’t have any idea what to do. I had a notebook in my handbag, but I didn’t feel like writing quite yet.</p><p>After a few moments Slava opened the door. Her hair was damp, but wrung severely so that it did not drip on the floor, and her long strands of black hair were pulled back in a knot. She had a towel wrapped around herself haphazardly. I could see her shoulders sloping downward, her torso rising and falling under the fabric as she breathed. “Are you tired?” she asked me, standing in the doorway. I shook my head, and she walked in. She sat on the bed next to me and stretched her arms. “Do not worry,” she said to me, as if anticipating what I’d say, “my hair will not drip on the bed. See, touch it. Is just damp.”</p><p>I put my hand to her head, stroking her hair. Directing her closer to me. I was kissing her throat, her collarbone, her mouth. She was taking off her towel and throwing it on the rug and climbing on top of me, holding me in her arms as we lay down. “You are okay with this, here and now? You are sure?” she said, her voice so low and soft it was almost a whisper.</p><p>“Yes,” I said, feeling her body, cool from recently coming out of water, on me, closing my eyes reflexively and opening them as soon as I realized what I was doing, “oh yes.” I was certain, we both were. We were both our own people, and we were joined, and we were free, in who we were, and together.</p><p>“We’re alive,” I breathed, my head thrown back over the pillows, my back arching with her on top of me, “oh, we’re alive.” One of us, sometime, had turned off the lights, and the light from the moon and decorated trees outside was illuminating the room in shadows and swathes of gold and silver and red light.</p><p>“That we are,” Slava said, the glimmer of the lights illuminating her face like we were in her old club and she was dancing for me, like we were snowflakes in the winter kingdom in the Nutcracker.  She smiled broadly, closing her eyes and shaking her head as she lay next to me, whispering in my ear as she touched my face with her hands, drawing me in close to her.</p><p>_</p><p>That night, likely because I’d been thinking of her so much, I dreamed of her again, of me, when I was young. I was at the counter in Hobie’s shop, and someone knocked, so I opened the door and there she was.</p><p>She was covered in rain, and her eyes were red. “I am going to die,” she said to me plainly. I nodded at her with as much empathy as I could. I did not know if she knew who I was in this dream.</p><p>“You’re going to live,” I told her. “Come in. We’ve been waiting for you,” I said, thinking it sounded like the right thing to say. She looked behind her, out through the opened door, but from where I was I could not see outside. I had the feeling outside was not New York. “It’s okay,” I told her. “You can look back. Sometimes you need to.” She nodded quietly, looking at me like she had questions.</p><p>“I want to see my mother again,” she said miserably.</p><p>“You’ll see her again,” I said a bit too quickly. She looked at me like she didn’t understand. “One day you’ll find her. You’ll find her in yourself.” She looked confused. I knew that it probably didn’t sound real, it sounded like something a guidance counselor would say, but that wasn’t it.</p><p>“Are you telling the truth?” she asked. “How do I know you’re not lying?”</p><p>“I don’t lie to myself anymore,” I said, more to myself than her. So I looked at her, and touched her soaked shoulder, looking in her morose, vulnerable eyes. I told her, “now go on. Go and live, Theo Youngbird.”</p><p>_</p><p>In the early morning, I woke when the sunrise lit up the city and the sun blazed through my window with its open curtains, and I was wrapped in the blankets and bedsheets, Slava’s arms and hair coiled around me. With no clothes, it was cool, but due to the two of us being close together and covered up and in a warm building, I supposed we were fine enough and wouldn’t get colds. I didn’t feel bad at all. I felt perfectly contented- actually, happy. Slava was fast asleep, and I didn’t want to wake her up due to how early it was. But even though I hadn’t slept for too long, I didn’t feel tired- I felt perfectly awake.</p><p>I reached my arm to the night table and pulled out the blank notebook from my handbag, its small pages thick and red. I got out a pen, and began to write about last night and yesterday, and the days before. I was sitting up against the pillows and Slava’s arm was around my waist and her long loose hair was splayed out over me, and I could feel her breaths and heartbeat, and I knew it wouldn’t be too long before she woke up, and I could always continue writing later. I would write the truth. I would write how I had been living, what I had been doing. I would write what I had learned about myself and my mother and my family, and later I could write of what I would learn. I would write about how I felt and why. I would write about myself and Slava and how we love each other. I would write about how Hobie and I became and are each other’s family. I would write about New York and Nevada and Massachusetts and Kansas and anywhere else my life would take me. I would write about my life, I thought, up to now, and then I’d keep going. I would write in English, and one day I would be able to write in Tsalagi, the language that my mother and I should have learned together, and that she never got a chance to learn completely, but that still existed, that survived history. And if I read my life, written by my hand on those pages, it wouldn’t always be a complete version of events, and maybe I’d never know how to put it all into words. But those words would be my own, telling my story.  </p>
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